Last year, Nigeria was ranked 124 in the Global Competitiveness Report. In the 2016-2017 report released some days ago, the giant of Africa dropped three notches to 127 out of 138 economies.
The Global Competitiveness Report is a cross-country benchmarking analysis of the factors and institutions that determine long-term growth and prosperity. It assesses the competitiveness landscape of 138 economies, providing insight into the drivers of their productivity and prosperity.
The report shows that overall, growth remains persistently low: commodity prices have fallen, as has trade; external imbalances are increasing; and government finances are stressed. However, it also comes during one of the most prosperous and peaceful times in recorded history, with less disease, poverty, and violent conflict than ever before. Against this backdrop of seeming contradictions, the Fourth Industrial Revolution brings both unprecedented opportunity and an accelerated speed of change.
The GCI combines 114 indicators that capture concepts that matter for productivity and long-term prosperity (described in greater detail in Appendix A). These indicators are grouped into 12 pillars (Figure 1): institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labor market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication, and innovation. These pillars are in turn organized into three subindexes: basic requirements, efficiency enhancers, and innovation and sophistication factors. The three subindexes are given different weights in the calculation of the overall Index, depending on each economy’s stage of development, as proxied by its GDP per capita and the share of exports represented by raw materials. Appendix A presents a description of each pillar, a classification of economies by stage of development, the detailed structure of the GCI, and a description of the various steps of its computation, including normalization and aggregation.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, Mauritius (ranking 45th) and South Africa (47th) remain the region’s most competitive economies, climbing two places and one place, respectively. Rwanda (52nd) comes third in the region.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s competitiveness has slightly weakened year on year, mainly as a consequence of deteriorating macroeconomic environments across the region (Figure 18). Public finance has been put under stress by economic slowdowns among trading partners and persistently low commodity prices, which affect the commodity-exporting countries. These factors help to explain why growth has dropped from over 5.0 percent two years ago to only 3.5 percent in 2015 and is projected to fall further, to 3.0 percent, in 2016.
Five sub-Saharan Africa economies improve their GCI rankings by three to six positions and their scores by 2 percent or more: Rwanda (52nd), Botswana (64th), Ghana (114th), Tanzania (116th), and Sierra Leone (132nd). Nigeria’ s economy, on the other hand, deteriorated scoring 127.
Switzerland, Singapore and the United States remain the three world’s most competitive economies.
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