Ghana went down by five places to 111th in the latest Global Competitiveness Rankings released by the World Economic Forum. 

The report showed that Ghana went down from 106 in 2018 to 111 in 2019. 

The country in 2018 with a ranking of 106 out of140 countries scored 51.3 out of 100. 

In 2019, the country laced 111 out of 141 countries ranked in the report, but with a score of 51.2. 

This means that in terms of score, Ghana declined by 0.1 points. 

The ranking was based on 12 indicators, Ghana’s best performance was under institutions, where the country was ranked 69 out of 141 countries with the score 54.4 over 100. 

Ghana also performed poorly in macroeconomic stability, where the country was ranked 132 out of 141 countries with a score of 59.5

Understanding Ghana’s performance

Ghana’ rankings might not necessarily mean that it performed badly in all the pillars, but possibly due to other countries moving up strongly in terms of the rankings. 

This is because, during the year under review, Ghana just went down by 0.1 per cent, that’s from 51.3 to 51.2 in terms of the score recorded.

 What goes into the Global Competitive rankings?

The Swiss-based World Economic Forum has been measuring the competitiveness of countries since 1979. 

It defines the ranking as a set of institutions, policies and factors that determines the level of productivity of a country.  

The Global Competitiveness rankings or Index GCI is the product of an aggregation of 103 individual indicators, derived from a combination of data from international organizations as well as from the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey. 

Indicators are organized into 12 ‘pillars’: Institutions; Infrastructure; ICT adoption; Macroeconomic stability; Health; Skills; Product market; Labour market; Financial system; Market size; Business dynamism; and Innovation capability. 

A country’s performance on the overall GCI results as well as each of its components is reported as a ‘progress score’ on a 0-to-100 scale, where 100 represents the ‘frontier’, an ideal state where an issue ceases to be a constraint to productivity growth. 

Each country should aim to move closer to the frontier on each component of the index. 

GCI 4.0 allows economies to monitor progress over time. This approach emphasizes that competitiveness is not a zero-sum game between countries—it is achievable for all countries a performance

How other African countries performed?

Led by Mauritius (52nd), sub-Saharan Africa is overall the least competitive region, with 25 of the 34 economies assessed this year scoring below 50. 

South Africa, the second most competitive in the region, improves to the 60th position, while Namibia (94th), Rwanda (100th), Uganda (115th) and Guinea (122nd) all improve significantly. 

Among the other large economies in the region, Kenya (95th) and Nigeria (116th) also improve their performances but lose some positions, overcome by faster climbers. 

On a positive note, of the 25 countries that have improved their Health pillar score by two points or more, 14 are from sub-Saharan Africa, making strides to close the gaps in healthy life expectancy.