Many argue that developing countries should now strive for greater Competitiveness. At the same time the term has been widely criticized for being a dangerous obsession: a vague code-word for pro-business, anti-worker, anti-environment, and anti-poor policies. This report is part of a series of Competitiveness Reports first published by the World Economic Forum in 1979. In this 2000 edition, co-authors Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner of Harvard University define Competitiveness more precisely as the ability to achieve rapid economic growth over a long time period. Michael Porter of Harvard University defines a competitiveness index that ranks countries on the ability to achieve high current productivity. The first is called the growth competitiveness index and the second is called the current competitiveness index.
According to the growth index, countries are deemed Competitive if they score high on economic indicators that have been shown empirically to be related to recent cross-country growth rates. The rankings that come out of this process show that competitive countries do not tend to be high-inequality countries nor anti-environment countries.
This book includes these two competitiveness rankings, an executive summary that describes the framework behind these two rankings, and further articles on globalization, economic creativity, the underpinnings of productivity, environment, the euro and education. The book also includes country-profiles that summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each country, and an extensive body of data from the Forum's executive opinion survey.