Lithuania has risen three notched to the 29th place in the IMD World Competitiveness ranking this year, compared to last year, overtaking Estonia, Latvia, and Poland.
This year, the business efficiency score had a major impact on Lithuania’s good overall performance as the country jumped from the 30th to the 23rd position in terms of business efficiency in the country.
In terms of government efficiency, the country’s ranking went up from the 31st to the 29th position.
Lithuanian performed slightly worse in terms of economic performance and infrastructure, going down from the 36th to the 39th position and from the 29th to the 30th position respectively.
Estonia came in 35th this year, dropping from the 31st position last year. Latvia remained in the 40th position, unchanged from last year, and Poland came in 38th, from 34th last year.
Among the post-Soviet countries, Lithuania (32nd), Kazakhstan (34th) and Estonia (35th place) occupy the highest places in the ranking.
The IMD World Competitiveness Rankings, established in 1989, incorporate 235 indicators from each of the 63 ranked economies. The ranking takes into account a wide range of “hard” statistics such as unemployment, GDP and government spending on health and education, as well as “soft” data from an Executive Opinion Survey covering topics such as social cohesion, globalization, and corruption.
This information feeds into four categories – economic performance, infrastructure, government efficiency, and business efficiency – to give a final score for each country. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for competitiveness, but the best-performing countries tend to score well across all four categories.
