Related Articles
Top Stories
May 27 2012 11:21
There's a price war raging between South Africa's cellphone networks after Cell C lowered the rates of its prepaid calls by more than 34%.
May 27 2012 13:09
The oversupply of golf estates has claimed another victim.
May 27 2012 11:49
The country's 200 000-odd Tupperware agents are angry about the counterfeit products being sold as the real McCoy.
Johannesburg - South Africa improved one position in the World Economic Forum's (WEF) 2004 global competitiveness rankings and leads the sub-Saharan region, Business Unity South Africa (Busa) said on Wednesday.
The country moved from 42nd to 41st out of 104 countries surveyed.
"While a large number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa hold positions in the lower half of the rankings, South Africa leads the region in the global rankings, showing an overall improvement on last year's performance," said Busa in a statement.
Busa is the South African partner of the World Economic forum for the world competitiveness survey.
Last year Botswana led in Africa, but it is second to South Africa in the 2004/2005 rankings.
South Africa was placed ahead of every country in Latin America, except Chile.
Three of the five bottom-ranked countries are from Africa, including Angola and Chad.
Zimbabwe was rated the lowest among the countries surveyed for its inflation performance, credit ratings, the soundness of the banking system, the costs of its agricultural policies, its brain drain and freedom of the press, the WEF report said.
Finland was ranked number one followed by the United States and then Sweden. Taiwan was placed fourth.
Japan is ranked ninth and the United Kingdom is in eleventh place while Italy continued its decline. The country was 26th in 2001 and is now 47th.
Raymond Parsons of the National Economic Development and Labour Council said the far East remained quite stable, while South America generally dropped in the rankings.
Chile was the exception - it improved to 22nd from 28th last year.
The rankings are drawn from the results of a survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, which polled around 8 700 business leaders worldwide.
The survey places particular attention "on elements of the macro-economic environment, the quality of public institutions which underpin the development process, and the level of technological readiness and innovation", according to the WEF report.