São Paulo – This Wednesday (3rd), the World Economic Forum (WEF) has released its Global Competitiveness Report 2014-2015, covering 144 countries. The assessment of Middle East and North Africa countries shows a ‘mixed picture,’ as per a press release from the WEF.
According to the survey, the region is plagued by political instability. The highlight is the United Arab Emirates, which has climbed from the 19th to the 12th position in the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), overtaking Qatar as the best-placed Arab country on the list.
Other Arab economies did not perform as well, including Qatar, which has dropped from 13th to 16th; Saudi Arabia, from 20th to 24º; Kuwait, from 36th to 40th; Bahrain, from 43rd to 44th; and Oman, which has slid from 33rd to 46th. These countries, alongside the Emirates, comprise the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a bloc of major exporters of oil, gas and their products.
Arab countries whose positions on the ranking have improved include Jordan, from 68th to 64th; Morocco, from 77th to 72nd; Algeria, from 100th to 79th; and Yemen, from 145th to 142nd. Mauritania remained in the same position (141st), while Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt and Libya all lost positions.
The report underscores the “stark contrast” between the scores achieved by Gulf countries and their Arab counterparts. “Ensuring structural reforms, improving the business environment and strengthening the innovative capacity so as to enable the private sector to grow and create jobs are of key importance to the region,” the WEF press release states.
Brazil, in turn, has lost one position, from 56th to 57th. In its overview of Latin America, the survey posits that in order to reduce vulnerability and keep the economic momentum of past years, the region’s major economies “are still in need of implementing structural reforms” that are long overdue.
By the way, the reforms issue is essential not only to Arab and Latin American countries, but to the economies surveyed as a whole. According to the report, global economic growth is at risk because, despite the adoption of “bold” monetary policies over the past few years, several countries still “struggle to implement structural reforms necessary to help economies grow.”
The survey notes that reforms implementation varies from country to country, depending on their region and level of development, and this is the “biggest challenge to sustaining global growth.”
The world’s most competitive economies according to the WEF, are Switzerland, Singapore, United States, Finland, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, Holland, United Kingdom and Sweden. The survey points out that the USA and Japan have moved up in the ranking for the second straight year.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
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