Brazil Ranks 71st in Global Competitiveness, Says World Economic Forum Report

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The best-positioned country in this ranking was Singapore, beating the United States, which ranks second. Hong Kong is in the 3rd position, followed by the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

The survey was released yesterday, October 9th, in Brasília, during the 1st Seminar on Competitiveness of the Infrastructure Sector, at the headquarters of the National Department of Transport Infrastructure (DNIT).

In 2018, Brazil ranked 72nd in the study, prepared in partnership with Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC). According to the survey, the country is in a “slow process of competitiveness recovery”.

Also according to the study, the preceding years showed a “free fall in virtually all competitiveness indicators”.

“It lost in absolute and relative competitiveness in this period, reaching its worst position in the ranking in 2016. In 2017, given the change in the reporting methods, greater control of public spending and expectations of future changes, the country began a new growth cycle that, however, did not continue in 2018,” said the document released by the Forum and the FDC.

Size and obstacles

According to the executive secretary of the Ministry of Infrastructure, Marcelo Sampaio, competitiveness is a “government strategy, although some factors generate distortion due to the size of our country,” he said at the opening of the event.

“We expect to take the first step toward this bold objective because infrastructure is one of the main obstacles to the economic growth of the country, which has stopped growing due to excessive obstacles,” he added.

According to the special secretary of Productivity and Competitiveness of the Ministry of Economy, Carlos da Costa, Brazil still has much room for improvement.

“In relation to the United States, our productivity has been declining since 1980 and today is approximately 25 percent of that of the United States. The low progress in Brazilian productivity led to the country’s decline in global competitiveness rankings.”

“We are still far from the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] countries. International studies agree on the main productivity obstacles in Brazil, and we are working to attack them one by one,” he said.

The Special Secretariat for Productivity and Competitiveness of the Ministry of Economy’s goal is for Brazil to reach 50th place by 2022.

The index of the World Economic Forum includes over 110 variables, part of which comes from executive opinion polls and part comes from sector indicators.

The variables are organized in 12 cornerstones, with each one representing an area considered to be an important competitiveness driver.

Latin America

Among the Latin American countries, Chile (33rd) remains in regional leadership, followed by Mexico (46th) and Uruguay (54th). Both lost some positions this year.

All other Latin American nations, with the exception of Brazil and Colombia, experienced competitive setbacks in the 2019 survey.

The survey’s analysis suggests a trend towards the concentration of competitiveness in just a few countries. On the other hand, the examination of the reports from the past three years points to an increase in the gap between the most and least competitive nations.

Worse social indicators

According to the coordinator of FDC’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, Carlos Arruda, in many of the countries surveyed there was “a worsening in several important social indicators”, such as unemployment and social inequality.

“The results point to frustration in social and environmental advances, in view of the sustainable objectives of the 2020 millennium agenda,” he said.

In the case of Brazil, he added, “social mobility takes, on average, nine generations to happen, while in nations like Denmark and Chile, this number is two or six generations, respectively”.

Among the countries with the highest competitiveness ratings, 20 are European; two are from North America; seven are Asian; four from the Middle East; two from Oceania and only one (Chile) is Latin American.

Source: Agência Brasil