Jordan's Article

In my article: Revised Rankings (http://jordantimes.com/revised-rankings) by Yusuf Mansur, Mansur speaks about how Jordan is slipping in global competitiveness, going from 65th among 139 countries to 71 among 142 countries. Jordan's ranking remained the same in ease of starting a business, and got a little better with registering property and trading across borders. Otherwise, every other possible ranking showed a decline. The biggest drop was in enforcing contracts; Jordan’s rank dropped 57 places.

The global competitiveness report states: "The Report contributes to the understanding of the key factors determining economic growth, helps to explain why some countries are more successful than others in raising income levels and opportunities for their respective populations... the concept of competitiveness, defined as the set of institutions, policies, and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country, in an effort to understand and measure the drivers of economic prosperity". This relates to what we talked about in terms of potential natural income. From reading about this report, I realized that the competitive nature of different countries depends largely upon productivity and the little factors that stem from productivity in general. In order to be productive, a country must use its resources efficiently. That means that the more competitive the country, the more efficiently it uses its labor, capital and natural resources along with having a higher quality of those resources.

In order for Jordan to increase its standings in the global competitiveness report the country should work towards using the most of their resources. Make sure their labor force is healthy, getting good educations and that there are enough jobs and businesses to keep the unemployment rate down. Make sure any capital is not sitting around idol and is working to its full capacity. Harvest in a sustaining way the resources that the country has. Make sure that sustainable crops and farming methods are being used. The most important thing though (in my opinion) is to develop technology and make sure that everything is continually updated with more efficient technology. It takes one person two hours to dig a hole with a shovel that takes a piece of machinery ten minutes to dig. The government could try to put some of its funds inwards to help develop technology and enrich the labor force with medicine and good education.

The global competitiveness quotes came from: http://reports.weforum.org/global-competitiveness-2011-2012/