Singapore has moved up one spot to place fourth in the latest edition of the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking, after Denmark, the United States, and Sweden. The ranking considers 63 global companies, assessing each country on 54 criteria and polling mid and senior-level executives.
According to the World Competitiveness Centre (WCC), an independent academic institution based in the International Institute for Management Development (Singapore and Lausanne, Switzerland), Singapore’s progress was driven by an enhancement in tertiary education (improvement in pupil-teacher ratio), an increase in its share of employees working in research and development (R&D), and improvements in regulation conducive to overseas talent attraction and scientific research.
Notably, South Korea moved up four places to rank eighth, making it the second Asian country on the leaderboard. Hong Kong, on the other hand, saw a drop from second to ninth place. It came in 41st for R&D expenditure as a percentage of gross domestic product and 24th for R&D productivity.
WCC commented that East Asian economies are among those showing the highest level of cyber security capacity, but all regions are “far from being fully prepared to combat sophisticated cyber attacks”.
(Source: Straits Times)
