IMD World Competitiveness Booklet 2022

World Competitiveness 2022: And the turmoil continues

Arturo Bris Director IMD World Competitiveness Center

Christos Cabolis Chief Economist IMD World Competitiveness Center

José Caballero Senior Economist

Marco Pistis Research Specialist

1. Introduction The 34 th edition of the IMD World Compet- itiveness Yearbook is being launched at a moment of tremendous turmoil. COVID-19 continues to affect large parts of the world. Interestingly, while in some countries comprehensive efforts are being made to return to a state of normalcy, other parts of the world are experiencing a massive rise in the number of infected people. In addition to the health and economic risks that countries are strug- gling to address, an additional perilous situation has emerged: the geopolitical risk that has been re-introduced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In what follows we will explore the competitive- ness standings of the 63 countries we have studied for this edition and introduce the broad set of trends for 2022. At the IMD World Competitiveness Center, we are delighted to note the inclusion of an additional economy in the 2022 Yearbook: Bahrain. However, the total number of economies that have been ranked is 63, which is two economies shy of the expected grand total. This is because two economies, namely Russia and Ukraine, are not included in the 2022 ranking due to the limited reliability of the data collected. To preserve the quality

and robustness of our results, we were compelled to exclude the two economies; we hope only temporarily. The year 2021 began with great expec- tations and widespread optimism that the world will find its feet again. Since the summer of 2020, different vaccines against COVID were developed and approved by health authorities throughout the world. 2021 also exhibited the ability of the scientific community to develop a vaccine very quickly on the one hand; and the flexibility of governmental institutions to approve the vaccine at record times, on the other. In what follows, first we review the land - scape of 2022. We then introduce the opinions of the IMD Executive Survey respondents to identify the key challenges they face this year. In the next section, we assess the regional competitiveness trends followed by the discussion of those trends among high-ranking economies. In addition, we consider the ranking vari- ation at the country level focusing on the economies that experience the largest improvements and those that show the sharpest downturns.

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