The IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking measures the capacity and readiness of 64 economies to adopt and explore digital technologies as a key driver for economic transformation in business, government and wider society. Based on a mixture of hard data and survey replies from business and government executives, the digital rankings help governments and companies to understand where to focus their resources and what might be best practices when embarking on digital transformation.
Like last year, the United States come out on top of the 2021 ranking, followed by Hong Kong and Sweden which both improve their scores compared to 2020. Denmark and Singapore recede slightly from last year and are in place 4 and 5, respectively.
Increasing digital competitiveness
Luxembourg improves its ranking by no less than 6 places and is 22nd in the 2021 study. It improves its ranking in all the three main factors that the study uses to define digital competitiveness: knowledge (29th in 2021, compared to 35th in 2020), technology (14th compared to 17th) and future readiness (24th compared to 27th).
Luxembourg’s strong performance in the “technology” category is in particular due to its regulatory framework (it notably ranks 2nd in the world for its immigration laws and 9th for its scientific research legislation) and its capital (Luxembourg ranks 1st in the world for its country credit rating and 3rd for its IT & media stock market capitalisation).
In the “future readiness” category, the country improves its performance in all the three main sub-categories: IT integration (for which it ranks 12th), business agility and adaptive attitudes. Although not as high, the scores in the sub-categories in the field of “knowledge” (training & education, talent and scientific concentration) improve as well.
Photo: © Luxinnovation/Sabino Parente