IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2020

Figure 2: Trends in Digital Competitiveness by region

For 2020, economies that top our ranking focus on building their talent pool and thus strengthen the knowledge infrastructure necessary to develop and employ digital technology with Singapore, Switzerland, and the Netherlands holding the top three positions respectively. In addition, most leading economies in our ranking provide an effective regulatory framework that enables the development and introduction of technologies. Singapore, Norway, UAE and Denmark capture the top four places in this sub-factor.

economies. The Republic of Korea, Denmark and the USA excel in the dimension of individual adaptive attitudes while Taiwan-China, the USA, the Republic of Korea and China capture the four highest places in the area of business agility. In the following sections, we review the main facts for the top ten economies, we identify the characteristics of the largest increases and declines, as well as the challenges for the bottom ten economies in our ranking. We begin by outlining the trends in digital competitiveness at the sub- regional level. Figure 2 presents the sub-regional overall digital competitiveness ranking trend for the years 2016 to 2020. Only Eastern Asia and South America regions achieved an increase in their digital competitiveness rankings between 2019 and 2020; the other sub-regions remained stable or experienced a decline in their overall average positions. Eastern Asia tops the regional rankings, steadily increasing since 2016 from an average ranking position of about 20 th to about 15 th in 2019 finally reaching an average of 13.4 in 2020. Western Europe remains stable at about 21 st in 2020 but becomes the second most digital competitive region because of a small decline experienced

Finally, top performers in digital competitiveness also combine individual adaptability with business agility in their

Digital competitiveness regional trends: Overall ranking

The WDCR studies 63 economies most of which have a high or middle level of income per capita. Figure 1 provides a visualization of the changes in the ranking between 2019 and 2020. Of the economies in the study, 29, experienced a decline in the ranking. From the remaining, 23 advanced, while 11 remained in the position as last year. The largest improvements in the ranking compared to 2019 have been experienced by Cyprus, Estonia, Turkey, Greece, Brazil and China. The largest declines have affected instead South Africa, Luxembourg, Russia, Mexico and Spain. Below, we discuss these trends in more details.

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IMD WORLD DIGITAL COMPETITIVENESS RANKING 2020