On October 1, the IMD World Competitiveness Center has just published the fourth edition of the IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking or abbreviated as WDCR, which measures the capacity and readiness of 63 countries to adopt and explore digital technology for economic and social transformation.
WDCR relies on three factors:
- Knowledge; which captures the intangible infrastructure necessary for the learning and discovery dimensions of technology.
- Technology; which quantifies the landscape of developing digital technologies.
- Future Readiness; that examines the level of preparedness of an economy to assume its digital transformation.
A. Trends in Digital Competitiveness over 63 Countries
The WDCR studies 63 economies most of which have a high or middle level of income per capita. Figure 1 provides a visualization of the changes in the ranking between 2019 and 2020. Of the economies in the study, 29, experienced a decline in the ranking. From the remaining, 23 advanced, while 11 remained in the position as last year.
The largest improvements in the ranking compared to 2019 have been experienced by Cyprus, Estonia, Turkey, Greece, Brazil and China. The largest declines have affected instead South Africa, Luxembourg, Russia, Mexico and Spain.
Figure 2 presents the sub-regional overall digital competitiveness ranking trend for the years 2016 to 2020. Only Eastern Asia and South America regions achieved an increase in their digital competitiveness rankings between 2019 and 2020; the other sub-regions remained stable or experienced a decline in their overall average positions.
B. Digital Competitiveness Performance in Indonesia
The information above shows that currently there is a rapid development of digital technology. Digital technology in the form of Internet of things (IoT), automation, robotic, data science and artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being developed to solve many problems.
Although overall the Eastern Asia region has experienced an increase, the WDCR for Indonesia, which was just released by IMD on October 1, 2020, shows that Indonesia is still ranked 56 out of the 63 countries researched. It means that the ranking is the same as last year and is still below several neighbouring countries.
from the report data, Indonesia’s ranking has increased in the Future Readiness factor, but there has been a decline in the Technology factor and also the Knowledge factor, where if it is further analyzed on the Knowledge factor, it turns out that the Talent sub-sector and the Training & Education sub-sector have decreased.
Indonesia is still lagging in digital competition, it is our common challenge to accelerate the readiness and availability of talents who are experts in the digital area. From the data described above, it can be seen that the current situation is increasingly pressing Indonesia to create synergies between the world of education, industry, government and the community to lead to the data science & AI ecosystem.
