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...INDEX...
...development race. The Global Competitiveness Report tallies 113 factors that contribute to an economy's competitiveness--a buzzword that roughly boils down to how well a country is positioned to squeeze efficiency out of its businesses and attract companies and investment from abroad. Components of the resulting Global Competitiveness Index range from the quality of a nation's roads to the independence of its judiciary to the incidence of tuberculosis to how easy it is to hire an engineer. Parts of the index are culled from official data; many others are drawn from a survey of 11,000 international business...
...Global Competitiveness Index is widely watched by countries that want to ferret out weak spots and by companies deciding where to invest. "We're taking the complexity of the world economy and simplifying it," says Jennifer Blanke, a senior economist at the WEF, "so that business and government can say, 'These are the obstacles going forward. What can we do to overcome them?'" In the overall ranking, the U.S. finishes first (same as last year) out of 131 countries, thanks in part to top scores in venture-capital availability (plentiful), domestic-market size (huge) and cost of firing workers...
...moderately taxed countries, are at the top of the list, but so are Denmark, Sweden and Finland, where taxes are sky high. "There's always the debate about more government, less government, more taxes, less taxes," says Xavier Sala-i-Martin, the Columbia University economist who designed the index. "This suggests that is the wrong debate. We should be talking about what the government does and not its size...
...INDEX...