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.