The 2024 IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking (WDCR), produced annually by IMD’s World Competitiveness Center (WCC), has shown how disparities in the development of digital infrastructure compounded by the ill effects of geopolitical tensions can be offset by joining the fast-moving current of emerging tech.
Overall, Singapore topped the ranking among 67 global economies. Switzerland was second and Denmark third.
Yes, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and quantum computing can widen the digital gap, but they can also drive innovation and reshape industries, economies, and societies, the ranking report said.
Countries that effectively exploit the power of these technologies are likely to enhance their digital competitive advantage, leading to sustained economic growth, improved productivity, and greater global influence. Key data sets in the ranking able to measure this include high-tech patent grants, intellectual property rights, and e-governance.
“Geopolitical rivalries, particularly between major powers such as the US and China’s technological competition, are fragmenting the digital landscape, influencing not only how other countries develop and use digital technologies but also their own ability to compete globally,” said José Caballero, Senior Economist at the WCC.
Top 3 deep dive
Singapore improved by two positions since last year’s edition to take the lead. Its strengths include its city management, number of high-tech patent grants, banking and financial services, and its public-private partnerships. The city-state was also first in the Talent, Regulatory Framework, Adaptive Attitudes, Business Agility, and IT Integration “sub-factors”.
It enjoyed a leap of nine positions to claim first place in the Future Readiness factor, which evaluates how prepared an economy is to adopt digital changes, emphasizing societal adaptability, business agility in adopting new technologies, and IT integration across sectors.
Switzerland progressed significantly in high-tech exports (ninth), e-participation (up 11 positions to 27th), and cyber security (11th), and its key strengths are intellectual property rights, international experience, communications technology, knowlege transfer, and foreign highly skilled personnel. In 2023’s edition it came fifth.
Denmark’s strengths lie in the quality and prioritization of its employee training, its excellent country credit rating, having agile companies and an open attitude towards globalization, efficient e-government, and reliance on secure internet servers (all indicators ranking first out of 67).
Educate, innovate, regulate
The US declined by three positions to rank fourth, which the report authors said could perhaps be explained by the high cost of enforcing contracts and a legal environment characterized by frequent litigation.
However, it came first by a large margin in the Computer Science Education Index measure, which creates a country score by using data from the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. It balances the quantity and quality in both absolute and per capita measurements to indicate how an economy’s universities and graduates perform on the world stage. This is relevant for the development of home-grown talent and to attract the finest minds from around the world. It was followed by the UK and China.
“Digital transformation goes hand in hand with financial development and inclusion,” said Professor Arturo Bris, Director of the WCC. “In conjunction with global regulation, national policies can feed the fair use of individual information. The European Union, the UAE, and Singapore are at an advantage in this sense compared to the US and China, where the “rule of digital law” is still not fully upheld. That said, Europe’s fragmented capital markets and financing systems are major obstacles to its digital competitiveness.”
The ranking uses 38 pieces of statistical data and 21 survey responses from senior executives to measure digital competitiveness among 67 global economies, exposing their various strengths and weaknesses.
New or improved pieces of data for 2024 included a measure of peer-reviewed literature on AI, a count of AI policies passed into law, and a flexibility and adaptability (of people, when faced with new challenges) measure.
This is the eighth year that the WCC has produced its WDCR, tracking the ever-changing conditions of digital governance, economy, and society. It is the first year that Ghana, Nigeria, and Puerto Rico have been measured.
