13/12/19: World Bank and WEF reports highlight relatively poor competitiveness rankings for Ireland

The latest World Bank "Doing Business" report rankings and the WEF's "Global Competitiveness Report" rankings show Ireland in a mid-tier 1 position (24th ranked in both tables) in terms of competitiveness - hardly an enviable position.

Ireland's position marks a deterioration from 23rd rank in WEF table, driven by relatively poor performance in ICT adoption (hmmm... Silicon Docks economy is ranked 49th in the World), macroeconomic stability (ranked 34th), product markets competitiveness (35th), and financial system (42nd).

Full WEF report here: http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_TheGlobalCompetitivenessReport2019.pdf and full WB report here: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/32436/9781464814402.pdf WB country profile for Ireland: https://www.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/country/i/ireland/IRL.pdf.

A summary chart for Ireland from WB report:

Which, again shows poor performance in the area of credit supply, as well as trading across the border (correlated to the effective market size),  but also in access to electricity, registering property, dealing with construction permits, and enforcing contracts.

30/5/2013: Irish Competitiveness Improves in 2013... but

IMD released its World Competitiveness Rankings yesterday (see link here: http://www.imd.org/news/World-Competitiveness-2013.cfm) and the results summary is:

Good news: Ireland's rank improved from 20th in 2012 to 17th in 2013 (we swapped places with Finland). Bad news: Ireland's ranking remains vastly below the 10th place back in 1997.

Here's the link to comparatives for Worst Ranking to Best Ranking by year: http://www.imd.org/uupload/imd.website/wcc/Perspective1997-2013.pdf

And here's 5 years data for Ireland:

As always, methodology is a 'black box', largely and GDP-based, which means it most likely overstates the true extent of Ireland's competitiveness.