Norway scores lower and Malawi scores higher on the Global Innovation Index for 2018 than their economies would predict.
Statistics and rankings fascinates me. These days, innovation is on everybody’s lips. The Global Innovation Index for 2018 was published recently by WIPO – the World Intellectual Property Organisation – in cooperation with two business colleges.
At the top of the list there are no surprises. One is used to find countries like Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden (the three countries with the highest score) at or near the top on various world rankings, whether they represent countries’ national income per capita or the happiness of a country’s population.
But looking further down the list, a Norwegian may get concerned. We are certainly not among the top five, as we are used to in global rankings, including in per capita income. Only as number 19th from the top you will find Norway, at the level of France, China, Estonia, and Italy. The index is built on a fairly large number of indicators. So where does Norway score particularly badly?
While we are no 1 on the indicators for general infrastructure (clearly linked to our hydropower), and no 2 on the rule of law, it seems that the dominance of oil and gas in the Norwegian economy and export plays a certain role in the calculation. We are for instance only no. 27 on spending (as a percentage of our high GNP) on secondary education and no 43 on tertiary education. The real expenditure instead of the relative might have given a fairer picture.
We are only no 42 in high-tech net export and no 61 in the export of ITC services, as a percentage of our trade. But our rank no 52 out of 126 countries in the number of graduates in science and engineering, and our no. 24 in creative outputs and no 25 in knowledge and technology outputs cannot only be explained by the dominance of oil and gas.
There are other factors pulling us down. We are no 22 in cost of firing people, measured in work weeks. And we are only no 54 as far as local competition is concerned. Some of us may question whether these scores as signs of lack of innovation. Fear of losing your job may not make you more creative, rather the opposite; you play safe. Local competition, for instance in delivery of health and social services, may also work the other way, squeezing employees to the extent that only the most elementary and basic functions are carried out, to the detriment of users and clients, and of innovative approaches. The index is clearly based on or at least influenced by ideological thinking that differs from the reasoning behind a Nordic welfare state.
I look for another country I know well, Malawi. Malawi is usually ranked among the five poorest in the world measured by national income per capita. There are only 24 African countries south of Sahara figuring in the report, the rest are not part of the statistics due to lack of data. Malawi, if appearing at all, should then be at the very bottom. But it is not. It is no 114, 13th from the bottom and near the middle among African countries. Below Malawi you find countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, Nigeria and Mozambique. I look for reasons in the figures. Malawi scores high on political stability and safety, no. 67 in the world. It scores comparatively well, number 84, on business sophistication, and very high on foreign direct investments (net inflows) as a percentage of GDP (no 18 in the world), where Norway, by the way, is at very bottom. Malawi’s ranking on this particular indicator must be due to development aid, and Norway’s due to our strength of our economy. How these scores influence innovation in the two countries, positive for Malawi and negative for Norway, I do not know.
The highest ranked SSA countries, not surprisingly, is South Africa as no 58, in a league of its own among the Africans. Thereafter Mauritius, Kenya, Namibia and Tanzania (at 92). It makes sense. More surprising is Madagascar at 106, above Ghana at 107.
One may question some of the components in the index, as to whether all the scores are indications of innovation. But the index certainly makes interesting reading.
Development Policy 