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International affairs

Australia gains two places in international digital competitiveness ranking

Australia has gained two places in an international ranking of 63 economies’ digital competitiveness, moving to 13 in the world.

CEDA CEO Melinda Cilento said for the digital competitiveness ranking, countries are rated on three core areas, knowledge, technology and future readiness, with three subsets ranked under each of these. 

“Australia has improved in all three core areas of the ranking which is very promising,” she said.

“Rapid technological changes are shifting opportunities in the global economy, this is an area where Australia must remain competitive if we are to maintain our strong economy and living standards.

“In 2014 and 2015 we were ranked 10 and nine respectively, before falling to 14 in 2016 and 15 in 2017. It is good we are again heading in the right direction.”

Ms Cilento said the subfactors where we have the strongest results were for talent (8) and adaptive attitudes (2).

“Our weakest rankings were for business agility (28) and training and education (32),” she said.

“These are both areas where we will need to focus our attention and actions. We need to ensure we are training and retraining our workforce with the right skillsets for the future. 

“Equally, business needs to be ready and able to utilise those skillsets and ensure they are well placed to compete globally.”

The IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking 2018 released on June 19, 2018 is a ranking for the 63 economies covered by the World Competitiveness Yearbook 2018 (WCY), which was released in late May 2018. The ranking is based on 50 ranked criteria: 30 factors based on data and 20 on survey responses. The WCY is produced by the Switzerland based IMD World Competitiveness Center. CEDA is the Australian partner for the yearbook. 

2018 WCY digital results

Read the Australian digital competitiveness results.
Read the international ranking of digital competitiveness.

2018 WCY results

In May 2018, the 2018 World Competitiveness Yearbook (WCY) results were released, and showed Australia climbed two places to be back inside the top 20 most competitive nations, coming in at 19 and moving ahead of the UK, New Zealand and Iceland.

Despite the positive high-level result, the report shows Australia faces a number of challenges to be more internationally competitive. Australia has dropped six places to 30 in its ranking for productivity and received a number of low rankings for its personal and corporate tax rates.

Read more on the 2018 WCY results.

About CEDA

CEDA – the Committee for Economic Development of Australia – is an independent, not-for-profit membership organisation.

We identify policy issues that matter for Australia’s future. We work to drive policies that deliver better economic, social and environmental outcomes for Australia. We deliver on our purpose by: Leveraging insights from our members to identify and understand the most important issues Australia faces. Facilitating collaboration and idea sharing to invoke imaginative, innovative and progressive policy solutions. Providing a platform to stimulate thinking, raise new ideas and debate critical and challenging issues. Influencing decision makers in government, business and the community by delivering objective information and expert analysis and advocating in support of our positions. CEDA's membership spans every state and territory and includes Australia's leading businesses, community organisations, government departments and academic institutions. The organisation was founded in 1960 by leading economist Sir Douglas Copland, and his legacy of applying economic analysis to practical problems to aid the development of Australia continues as we celebrate 60 years of influence, reform and impact across the nation.;
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