India Moves 5 Rungs Up to Rank 58 in WEF’s Competitive Economy Index

India has moved five notches up to rank as the world’s 58^th most competitive economy on the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) global competitiveness index for 2018.

Of the 140 economies listed, the U.S. leads the rank followed closely by Singapore at second and Germany at the third position respectively. India was ranked 58th with a score of 62.0. “This is the largest gain among all G20 economies,” the WEF said.

The Global Competitiveness Report 2018, which was published Oct. 17, showed India moving up the ranks based on a new methodology. The Nikkei Asian Review said WEF used a new methodology to include elements that determine productivity. Of the 98 indicators, 34 were retained from the previous methodology while the other 64 indicators are new, resulting in new updated list for 2017.

India’s giant northern neighbor China was ranked 28th in the list. The WEF said that the top performers in the “upper and lower middle-income brackets,” such as China and India, are catching up with or even outperforming the average among high-income economies, according to PTI.

According to the WEF report, “China, is already more advanced when it comes to investing in research and development sub-pillar than the average high-income economy, while India is not far behind and let down only by its less-efficient bureaucracy for business creation and insolvency.”

Quoting the report, PTI said India leads the region in all other areas of competitiveness except for health, education and skills, where Sri Lanka boasts the highest healthy life expectancy (67.8 years) and the workforce with the highest amount of schooling (9.8 years). “These two countries are also the ones that can rely on the most efficient infrastructure system. India has invested more heavily on transport infrastructure and services, while Sri Lanka has the most modern utility infrastructure,” the report said.

The report also said that India’s greatest competitive advantages are its market size, innovation (particularly the quality of its research establishments and business dynamism (including the number of disruptive businesses). While the areas that India needs to improve are labor market (worker’s rights), product market (trade tariffs) and skills (student-teacher ratio), the news agency said.

Other countries in the top 10 are Switzerland (4th), Japan (5th), Netherlands (6th), Hong Kong (7th), United Kingdom (8th), Sweden (9th) and Denmark (10th).

According to Nikkei, India was ranked 8th in the “quality of research institutions.” The WEF highly evaluates the country noting “a remarkable example of a country that has been able to accelerate on the pathway to innovation, due, particularly, to the quality of its research institutions, Nikkei said.

The ease of doing business in India has also improved. The cost of starting a business has come down and time to start a business has shortened over the year, Nikkei said quoting WEF report.