Phl slides to 59th in World Competitive ranking
Out of 64 countries surveyed by the Swiss-based IMD Competitive Center of the IMD Business School, the Philippines slid further to 59th this year from its 2022 record of 56th in the 2023 World Digital Competitiveness Ranking or WDCR.
The WDCR, published on Thursday, provides a glimpse at how 64 countries are approaching digital transformation in the age of artificial intelligence.
“The Philippines ranks 59th globally, down three places from last year, and takes the 13th position in the APAC region. The ranking is determined by three main factors: knowledge, technology, and future-readiness,” the IMD-WDCR report said.
On the other hand, the Philippines ranks 51st in the technology factor, securing 63rd place in the segment of knowledge factor, while the country ranked 59th in terms of the future readiness factor.
U.S. reclaims top spot
Meanwhile, the United States moved back to the top position with robust results across all three factors: knowledge, technology and future-readiness, after having fallen to second place for the first time since the inception of the WDCR in 2017.
“The consistency is the same as that of the Netherlands, which advanced four positions and ranks second, followed closely by Singapore, which ranked first in the technology factor,” the report further noted.
Last year’s WDCR overall leader Denmark dropped to fourth place mainly due to a decline in future readiness and technology factors.
Switzerland, the top-ranked economy in the knowledge factor, maintained its position and rounded out the top 5.
The top economies in this year’s ranking are those that could be considered “digital nations,” particularly countries that facilitate the full adoption of digital technologies — including AI — by governments, companies and individuals.
“While we measure no specific AI indicators, the technology sits silently at the core of several of the subfactors that we quantify: Talent, regulatory and technological frameworks, and adaptive attitudes and business agility. On a data level, the quality of digital regulation, the funding available for technology development, and the degree of company agility are all data points that are enmeshed with AI,” said Professor Arturo Bris, director of IMD’s World Competitiveness Center.
Moreover, the study said AI technology and national security concerns are at the core of another remarkable trend observed in the ranking: An increasing focus on cybersecurity.
Of the 4,000 senior executives around the world who responded to the WDCR survey, only five percent said they had not implemented any new cybersecurity measures in the past year.
“Cybersecurity becomes a clear example of the need to assess AI’s trade-offs and to take a very deliberate approach towards using it optimally. Countries cannot do this in isolation but need to lean on regional if not global institutions to do so,” Bris says.