India has jumped four places to the 44th position in digital competitiveness in the world, according to the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2019 (WDCR) report.
The report measures the capacity of 63 countries to adopt digital technologies as a key driver for economic transformation in businesses, governments, and society.
India’s development has been attributed to the country’s improvement in terms of knowledge and future readiness to explore new technologies.
The global report said that India advanced four places to 44th position in 2019, with the biggest improvement in the technology sub-factor level, holding the first position in telecommunications investment.
The United States was ranked the world’s most digitally competitive economy, followed by Singapore. Sweden came in third, followed by Denmark and Switzerland in the 4th and 5th place, respectively.
The list’s top ten of the most digitally competitive economies includes: the Netherlands in 6th place, Finland in 7th, Hong Kong SAR in 8th, Norway in 9th, and the Republic of Korea in 10th.
The largest jump in the overall ranking was registered by China, moving from 30th to 22nd, and Indonesia, from 62nd to 56th, the report noted.
The most significant improvements in the ranking were experienced by Asian economies such as China, Indonesia, Korea, and India. These changes had a marked effect on the digital performance of their sub-regions. Hong Kong SAR and the Republic of Korea entered the top-10 for the first time, while Taiwan and China moved up to the 13th and 22nd place, respectively.
The director of IMD World Competitiveness Centre stated that India and Indonesia jumped four and six positions, respectively, supported by positive results in talent, training, and education as well as the enhancement of technological infrastructure.
Last week, the government announced that it would conduct India’s next census through a mobile application. The app will provide socio-economic data, which will contribute to informed policy formulation and the appropriate allocation of resources.
According to its website, IMD said that in the highly interconnected and rapidly changing world, economies are affected by issues ranging from reservations over globalisation to scepticism over automation, from the challenge of sustainability to that of implementation. Not all economies approach these problems in the same way.
Competitiveness provides the framework to quantify the outcome of dealing with these challenges from a country perspective. Ultimately, it allows the organisation to recognise the factors that facilitate prosperity. And this is how IMD expects its rankings to be used and interpreted: competitiveness is both a tool and an objective of economic policy.
To evaluate an economy, the report studies knowledge, the capacity to understand and learn new technologies; technology, the competence to develop new digital innovations; and future- readiness, the preparedness for the coming developments.
