May 06, 2004
Romania: Not Competitive?
So there's this outfit called the International Management Development Institute, a business school in Lausanne, Switzerland. And every year, they publish something called the World Competiveness Scoreboard.
I'm sure you can already guess where this is going. For 2003, the IMDI trashed Romania, ranking it 54th out of 60 countries and regions. As usual, this has caused a certain amount of consternation here in Romania.
Me? I'm deeply skeptical.
We've been through this before, just a few months ago. I haven't had time to look at the "World Competitiveness Scoreboard" in detail yet, but what I've seen so far doesn't impress me much. Romania is less competitive than Russia? Than the Philippines? I've been to the Philippines, and I don't buy that for a second.
I'm starting to get really, really dubious about these things.
Posted by douglas at May 6, 2004 01:14 PMI have to say that my objections after a quick look basically boil down to one issue: no objective function. That is, AFAICT, the relationship of _all_ of the variables to "competitiveness" appears to be arbitrary, because I don't see any coherent, measurable definition of competitiveness against which one could regress.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at May 6, 2004 11:13 PM