Taiwan jumped three places to become the 13th most digitally competitive out of 63 countries and territories evaluated this year, a report published on Thursday by the Switzerland-based International Institute for Management Development (IMD) said.
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 last year, namely, the US, 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 ranked ninth 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 to augment value creation and prosperity in their countries, the IMD said.
Compared with last year, 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 No. 13 and No. 22 respectively, it added.
However, the report also cited some of Taiwan’s weaknesses, including a lack of foreign high-skilled personnel and poor pupil-teacher ratios 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 research and development” were included in the annual IMD report, with Taiwan ranked 7th and 21st respectively.
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