Lebanon’s competitiveness: Bottoming out

Lebanon is not in bad company for a peer group. According to the just published World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report (GCR), we are among those countries that are — and in many cases have been for quite a while — transitioning from a medium stage of development where efficiency gains drive improvements in competitiveness to an advanced one where innovativeness is the key differentiator. In WEF terminology, this phase is called the transition stage from efficiency driven to innovation driven economies, and it is the second most advanced of the five stages in the GCR. Inconveniently, though, Lebanon is the 2014 bottom scorer in the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) among the 24 countries in this category, with a score of 3.68 points that translates overall into rank 113 of 144 in the report’s latest edition, which was released this week. This is not a comfortable or even hopeful placement given that most countries