Taiwan jumps to 13th in IMD digital competitiveness ranking

Brussels, Sept. 26 (CNA) Taiwan jumped three places to become the 13th most digitally competitive out of 63 countries evaluated this year, according to a report published Thursday by the Swiss-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD).

Taiwan was also fourth among Asia-Pacific economies, behind Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea, but ahead of China, Japan and Malaysia, the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Rankings 2019 report showed.

The top five countries this year were unchanged from 2018: the United States, Singapore, Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland.

The World Digital Competitiveness Ranking measures economies using a variety of sub-indicators based on three major factors: knowledge, technology and future readiness.

Taiwan was ranked 9th in technology, 17th in knowledge and 12th in future readiness.

According to the Swiss-based institute, digital competitiveness is defined as the capacity of an economy to adopt and explore digital technologies leading to the transformation in government practices, business models and society in general.

Governments around the world are investing heavily in the enhancement of their digital economy in order to augment value creation and prosperity in their countries, the IMD said.

Compared with 2018, improvement in overall rankings was observed in some Asian economies this year, including Hong Kong and South Korea, which moved up into the top 10, while Taiwan and China also jumped to become No. 13 and No. 22, respectively, it added.

However, the report also pointed to some of Taiwan's weaknesses, including a lack of foreign high-skilled personnel, and poor pupil-teacher ratio in the tertiary education sector, both of which are sub-indicators for the knowledge factor.

For the first time, the sub-indicators "world robots distribution" and "robots in education and R&D" were included in the annual IMD report, with Taiwan ranked 7th and 21st, respectively.