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Croatia drops five points in Global Competitiveness report

Croatian Times

Croatia has sunk another five spots on the global competitiveness list, continuing a three-year drop that has landed it in 77th out of 139 places.

After enjoying a couple of years of progress between 2005 and 2007, Croatia has been on a downward spiral ever since. The president of the National Competitivenes Council, Ivica Mudrinic, says that the negative trend is not a consequence of the recession, but rather of internal problems. Another member of the Council, Branko Grcic, says that the Croatian position is worsening due to a lack of decisiveness to go ahead with serious reforms.

All of the transitional states from Central Europe are ahead of Croatia, with the Czech Republic in 36th place, Slovenia 45th, Montenegro 49th and Hungary 52nd.

The World Economic Forum determines the rankings from publicly available data and the Executive Opinion Survey of over 13,500 business leaders. The study looks at 12 key pillars: institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labour market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication, and innovation.

This year’s results warn about significant drops in financial labour market efficiency (to 113th place), market development (88) and business sophistication (92). Troubling are also the results of the quality of the institutions that look at the efficacy of the public administration and judiciary. Better results are noted in infrastructure (41th place), technological readiness (39th) and higher education (56th).

Switzerland has kept the first spot, followed by Sweden, Singapore, SAD and Japan.  Scandinavian countries and Canada are among the first ten. New EU members have varying trends – earlier champs like Czech Republic, Slovenia and Slovakia have registered a significant drop, while Poland and Hungary have shown considerable recovery in the last two years.

For first time in the last six years Romania and Bulgaria are ranked better than Croatia, the daily Vecernji List writes.

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