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The Philippines ranked lower in terms of global competitiveness this
year and still lagged behind its Asian peers, according to the
latest World Competitiveness Yearbook.
In its 2009 Yearbook, the Switzerland-based
Institute of Management Development (IMD) said the Philippines
ranked 43rd, or two notches down from last year, with a raw score of
54.490 among 57 countries.
“Our raw score has actually increased, but the
problem is that two new countries were added—Qatar and
Kazakhstan,” Ma. Lourdes Sereno, the executive director of the
Asian Institute of Management Policy Center, said Wednesday.
IMD ranked 57 economies from the most
competitive to the least competitive, with scores from 0 to 100
based on 329 criteria measuring different facets of competitiveness.
The Philippines trailed Malaysia, which placed
18th; Thailand, 26th; South Korea, 27th; and Indonesia, with a
dramatic change from 51st to 42nd.
It ranked higher in the following areas: growth
in commercial services, foreign direct investments, cost of living
index, tax revenue, central bank policy, aging of society, skilled
labor, flexibility and adaptability, investment in
telecommunications.
In “female position,” the Philippines ranked
No. 1 in the world.
The competitiveness criteria included economic
performance, government efficiency, business efficiency and
infrastructure.
The US remained on top, followed by Hong Kong,
Singapore, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Australia, Canada, Finland
and The Netherlands.
With the US scoring 100, Hong Kong is in second
place with a raw score of 98.146.
Acceptable showing
“We all have acknowledged the great stride we
need to undertake to ensure that the country [rebounds] back to the
competitiveness with the rest of the world,” said Ambassador
Donald Dee, special ambassador for International Trade.
Considering the plight of other countries in the
region and around the world that are heavily hit by the global
economic crisis and political uncertainty, Dee added, the
Philippines’ “slippage in the ranking by three notches from 40
in 2008 to 43 in 2009 is acceptable.”
What he found as “more alarming” was that
since 2005, the Philippines’ economic performance has shrunk 15
notches, “making us a laggard in poverty alleviation in the region
and in the equal distribution of income and wealth among the
population.”
And while the country has proved that its
economy is “one of the most resilient the world has ever known,”
it continues to suffer from low per capita income, increasing the
poverty base and lowering middle class participation.
Such suffering, Dee said, “can be attributed
to the ever-increasing and unmanageable population growth whereby
our per capita spending for social services shrinks year by year
because of the painstaking necessity to allocate the meager
resources to various welfare programs.”
“We need to find a common political ground in
tackling our unmanaged population growth that eats up our GDP [gross
domestic product] base and our long-term economic prospects,” he
added. GDP is the total value of goods and services produced in a
country in a year.
He suggested that effective programs, funding
and attention be expanded to education infrastructure, housing and
urban development, entrepreneurship and youth employment
participation.
Dee said the government needed to work
extensively with lawmakers to lessen adverse effects of politicking
on the country’s ailing competitiveness standing.
-- Lailany P. Gomez With Ben Arnold O. De Vera
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