Improving National Competitiveness Through the Optimized Allocation of Governmental Resources

We investigate the impact of ICT adoption, skills of the workforce, and Research and Development (R&D) expenditure on a country's overall competitiveness score. This was done primarily with data from the World Economic Forum's 2019 Global Competitiveness Report but we also use several additional data sources. We used various regression models to analyse the relationships between these variables and competitiveness. The findings revealed that ICT adoption, skills of the workforce, and R&D expenditure all had a significant effect on improving overall competitiveness. The results also indicate that reducing mobile broadband service prices significantly improved ICT adoption, while fixed broadband service prices had a minimal impact on ICT adoption. In addition, education expenditure as a percentage of GDP was found to have minimal impact on improving workforce skills suggesting other factors might be more impactful. This research can provide an understanding of the key drivers of competitiveness and offer insights to policymakers. Given the impact of each factor on competitiveness, one can then allocate public resources to maximize the resulting impact on competitiveness. Such an analysis is presently underway.