PETALING JAYA: Malaysia has slipped to 34th place in the IMD World Competitiveness Ranking 2024 – down from twenty seventh place in 2023.
The rating divides knowledge into 4 areas – financial efficiency, authorities effectivity, enterprise effectivity and infrastructure. Together, they seize numerous points of competitiveness, akin to macroeconomic stability, fiscal coverage, institutional high quality, market openness, enterprise dynamism, innovation, schooling, well being and environmental efficiency.
IMD World Competitiveness Centre director Arturo Bris, who has been behind the annual rating since its inception in 1989, mentioned that among the many 14 Asia-Pacific international locations, Malaysia was ranked tenth from its earlier sixth inserting.
“At a macro stage, Malaysia ranked excessive in phrases of costs (second), primary infrastructure (tenth), and tax coverage (eleventh),” he mentioned.
He mentioned regardless of the robust general efficiency, IMD discovered that Malaysia was much less aggressive in a number of different areas, akin to schooling (forty fourth), enterprise laws (fiftieth), and productiveness and effectivity (53rd).
The report highlighted that for 2024, the principle challenges for Malaysia shall be to enhance funding in analysis and growth to increase enterprise resilience.
“The nation additionally has to optimise the labour market to maximise workforce productiveness, replace insurance policies and laws to enhance world competitiveness, and leverage superior applied sciences to speed up productiveness development.”
Bris mentioned Malaysia should mitigate the rising prices of doing enterprise via strategic productiveness enhancements.
“We consider essentially the most aggressive economies of the longer term shall be these that may anticipate and adapt to the altering world context whereas creating worth and well-being for his or her individuals. This will translate into making them sustainable as properly.”
He mentioned the most important competitiveness challenges for the world’s economies in 2024 and past have been transitioning to a low-carbon and round financial system. “Countries even have to be conscious of rising markets’ rising integration into the world financial system, and maintaining with digital transformation.”
Bris mentioned the IMD rankings, which compute survey knowledge and 164 items of statistics have been performed between March and May 2024 amongst 6,612 C-level and mid-level managers from 67 economies.
He mentioned the three tendencies that survey respondents contemplate as having the best influence on companies in 2024 have been AI adoption (55.1%), threat of a worldwide financial slowdown (52%), and geopolitical conflicts (36.1%).
“AI adoption is one factor, however utilizing it’s one other matter. One of the important thing challenges for firms as we speak is how to implement AI programs that enhance effectivity with out disrupting enterprise actions.
“A associated problem is making certain their chosen AI system’s accuracy as a result of inaccurate programs lead to inefficiencies and decreased productiveness.”
While 27% of executives surveyed contemplate the transition to zero emissions to be an vital pattern in the brief time period, simply 12.2% highlighted the influence of worldwide warming as related.
Bris mentioned the outcomes mirrored a matter of priorities. For occasion, executives wanted to stability short-term priorities with long-term ones.
“Environmental dangers are seen as being in the latter class and are being given too little relevance regardless of them already affecting us. The high 10 ranked economies are dominated by smaller ones, which strongly signifies that financial competitiveness will not be a query of dimension.”
