Global Competitiveness Report (2011-2012):

Sri Lanka in great leap forward

A top riser in the Asian region:

*Shows improvements on 80pc of indicators

*Improvement ‘remarkable’ in ‘security’ pillar

Sri Lanka has made an impressive jump of 10 places to 52nd from 62nd in the rankings of the latest Global Competitiveness Report (2011-2012) issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

This is a further improvement from the 2009-2010 report which ranked the country at 79th position while last year’s report (2010-2011) placed Sri Lanka at 62nd, said the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS) which was the Sri Lankan partner institute in conducting the Executive Opinion Survey in building the GCR rankings. The WEF economists when speaking to all partner institutes specifically mentioned Sri Lanka as having performed strongly in rising up the rankings, and added it is among the top risers in the Asian region, IPS said.

“Sri Lanka has made a remarkable performance. When I look at the evolution across all indicators, Sri Lanka shows improvements on 80% of them - 80-90 of the 110 indicators - both in terms of scores as well as rank,” quoting WEF’s Centre for Global Competitiveness and Performance Associate Director Thierry Geiger IPS said.

“Last year was a big jump. In the last GCR, Sri Lanka improved its score by 0.24 points which we consider a big jump.”

This year the score improvement was not as big as last year, but there is consistency,” Geiger added.

Sri Lanka made the greatest improvements in scores, year-on-year, in the pillars of ‘macroeconomic stability’ (up by 0.48 points) and ‘infrastructure’ (up by 0.33 points). Meanwhile, the most noteworthy decline in scores was in the pillar of ‘labour market efficiency’ (down by 0.11 points). Geiger noted that the pillar of ‘red tape’ has improved significantly from a score of 3.8 to 5.1 (rising from rank of 113 to 59).

An improvement of 0.8 is seen in the ‘security’ pillar, which the WEF economist noted was “remarkable”, and attributed it to the improved climate following the end of the war.