State of the World: Global Competitiveness 2012 | Ministry of Clever
In this article, the Ministry of Clever takes a closer look at data from the World Economic Forum that illustrates how competitive and how productive each country in the world is. If you ever wondered how your home country performes, then take a look. Perhaps you’ll even be surprised?
People often quip that a picture is worth a thousand words. We can’t say for sure if that is true about graphs as well, but it does tell a lot about the state of our home planet. We’ll give you some hints below, but first we’ll teach you how to fish for facts. Our fish may feed you for a day, but if you learn the ropes, you’ll be fed for a lifetime. So then, to business:
- On the x-axis (that’s the one that goes from left to right) we have the GDP per capita, a measurement of how much value each country produces, divided by the number of inhabitants in that country. While it says nothing about who ends up with this money, generally a higher value means more cash to spread around – and a wealthier country.
- On the y-axis (going up and down) is the Global Competitiveness Index, a measurement by the World Economic Forum showing how well each country is able to compete against others. It tells us something about how well the country is able to compete with other countries – basically how “fit” it is, and how well it will be able to cope with whatever crisis may crop up.
- The colour going from blue through green to red tells us how developed the country is. A highly developed country is warm red, while an undeveloped country is cold blue. Note how more developed countries tend to have both higher GDP per capita and competitiveness index. It may come as no surprise: well developed nations are more likely to be wealthy and more likely to be competitive
- The size of each blop shows the population of each country. Many competitive countries are tiny. They may be power houses, but they’re very small power houses.
- Finally, the timeline on the bottom allows us to see how these values develop over time. Not such a long time frame here – just from 2008 to 2011, so we won’t see much change. But it’s there if you wanna play.
- You may hover your mouse pointer over each country blop to see the actual value of this country. Try it out! If you click on the bottom right link you can go to Google’s own tool and explore in even more depth, or you can go to the World Economic Forum’s own pages and read more about this study.
So – what can we learn from this figure?
Developed countries tend to be much more competitive. The top ten are (in declining order): Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden, Finland, The United States of America, Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark, Japan and The United Kingdom. They are all well functioning, stable democracies, and can roughly be put in one of two boxes: the old “Great Powers” (The USA, The UK, Germany and Japan) and nordic countries (Sweden, Finland and Denmark). Naturally, the old great powers have most of the population of these competitive nations – the nordic countries are fierce, but small.
If we move on to the GDP per capita, the top ten (again in descending order) are: Luxembourg, Norway, Qatar, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Australia, Sweden, The USA and The Netherlands. Note how many are in both lists and that all but one of the rest (Norway, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) are major oil exporters. Luxemburg and Switzerland are known as banking and finance industry havens, but these are not their only strengths. As you can see below, other strengths of Switzerland include beautiful mountains and weird music: