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Australia continued to trail in world competitiveness in terms of telecommunications infrastructure, according to a report by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD).
Out of 63 countries, the IMD 2022 World Competitiveness Yearbook ranked Australia 49th in mobile telephone cost, 47th in communication technology, and 45th in internet bandwidth speed.
The drop comes amid a slight increase in Australia’s overall global competitiveness, which placed 19th, a three-spot increase from last year when the country recorded a 25-year low in the same report.
According to the report, Denmark, Switzerland, Singapore, Sweden, and Hong Kong ranked first through fifth.
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The yearbook includes a poll of an average of 100 CEOs per economy and rates the 63 countries based on 333 competitiveness factors.
IMD uses this information to calculate four factors: economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure.
Among the four, Australia ranked the highest in economic performance and government efficiency, placing 16th in both categories. It came in 26th place for business efficiency and 19th place for infrastructure.
Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) CEO Melinda Cilento attributed the improvement to Australia’s strong trade and economic recovery from the pandemic.
Cilento said, “Australia’s terms of trade driven by strong commodity prices, employment numbers, and pandemic recovery have saved the day – ensuring our international competitiveness ranking improved and did not slip further.”
However, Cilento believes that the boost is only in for the short run.
“It is clear when compared against the top-performing countries that long-term and well-known weaknesses in the policy environment are holding Australia back,” she said.
Cilento said, “Australia’s future competitiveness is not assured without lifting our game on areas such as technology, energy, skills and training, entrepreneurship, tax, and productivity.”
Cilento also claimed that Australia’s ranking, which came behind Iceland, China, and Qatar, suggests that Australia’s export concentration remains an area of vulnerability.
“Australia must lift its game on trade – diversifying its trading partners and continuing to build new markets for the goods and services in which we compete,” she said.
With the low rankings, comm-tech, internet speed, and telephone cost were among those identified as Australia’s weaknesses in infrastructure, which placed 23rd in 2021.
Australia also placed 44th for government subsidies, 47th in renewable energies, and 45th for ICT service exports.
Cilento said, “Australian companies are far less digitally advanced than their global competitors, and information technology continues to be a much smaller contributor to our economy than other advanced economies.”
Entrepreneurship, which came at 61st place, is Australia’s worst result. Regarding workplace productivity, Australia listed a massive drop from 20th to 41st.
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Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
