Measuring our competitiveness - a critical examination of the IMD and WEF competitiveness indicators for South Africa

David Kaplan

Development Southern Africa, 2003, vol. 20, issue 1, 75-88

Abstract: This article examines the competitiveness indicators that are produced by the highly influential World Economic Forum (WEF) and the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), specifically in respect of South Africa. Neither provides a clear and persuasive guide as to South Africa's overall competitiveness ranking, nor how this has altered over time. The problem resides principally in the assessment of technological capacities and the contribution that technology makes to overall competitiveness. The IMD and the WEF approaches to technology diverge significantly, but both are inadequate. As a consequence, there is a substantial discrepancy between the two as regards South Africa's current overall competitive ness ranking. Neither individually, nor collectively, are these competitiveness indicators - as they are currently constituted - useful as a guide to policy.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0376835032000065499 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:deveza:v:20:y:2003:i:1:p:75-88

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CDSA20

DOI: 10.1080/0376835032000065499

Access Statistics for this article

Development Southern Africa is currently edited by Marie Kirsten

More articles in Development Southern Africa from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().