IMD Digital Competitiveness ranking a wakeup call of PH, expert says
While the Philippines showed some improvement climbing two notches up to the 58th spot out of the 63 countries in the recent IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking an expert says there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Citizens rights advocate group CitizenWatch Philippines’ convenor Orlando Oxales said this climb is an indication of incompetency.
Oxales is urging the government to address the resistance encountered by technology innovators through updating bureaucratic gauntlets and policies.
“You can look at the results in two ways. You can say the Philippines inched up two notches in the overall ranking, from 56th to 58th place. But the fact remains that with 63 countries included in the report, ranking 56th is so much closer to the bottom than it is to the top,” Oxales said.
“More importantly, we are the worst performers in Southeast Asia, lagging far behind our neighbors Singapore (4th), Malaysia (31st), Thailand (40th), and Indonesia (51st). For the whole of Asia, we outperformed only Mongolia,” he added.
Meanwhile, in a digital infrastructure forum, Stratbase group founder and CEO, Professor Victor Andres Manhit stated that heavy investments to build a robust nationwide digital infrastructure is critical to economic recovery and sustainability.
