China Places 26th on Global Competitiveness Survey
The World Economic Forum listed China as the world's 26th most competitive nation on its Global Competitiveness Report 2011-2012 released Wednesday.
Jennifer Blanke, lead economist director for the forum, said in her report that China remains relentless in rise in the rankings, with across-the-board strength in many areas.
The competitiveness report says moreover, that China continues to lead the way among large developing economies and solidifies its position among the top 30. In fact, China is the only BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) country to show improvement in the rankings this year, with remarkable strengths in large and growing market size, relatively sophisticated and innovative business, and macroeconomic stability.
This year's position, which is a notch up from last year's, is credited to impressive assessment of China's financial market, which is up by 24 notches. An analysis is also explained on the report that China exerted an effort to improve access to credit and financing through venture capital, banks, and equity markets. Chinese financial experts maintained that the banking sector has been perceived as sound.
Another area where China used to perform poorly but has shown improvements is the technological readiness, which according to the World Economic Forum is mainly due to low information and communcations technology penetration. In 2009, China made efforts to increase its mobile telephone subscriptions by more than 100 million and its Internet users by 86 million. In the present time, mobile penetration has gained 50 percent, while internet awareness is up by 25 percent.
Overall, China showed a good performance in most 12 pillars of the Global Competitiveness Index, a measure that surveys 142 economies.