The Finance Department on Monday criticized think tank IMD for ranking the Philippines 46th in its latest report on the world’s most competitive economies, saying the methodology it uses is erroneous.
In an economic bulletin, Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran said the IMD’s World Competitiveness Report pretended to cover the world and report on competitiveness.
“It does neither. It covers only 63 countries; in contrast, WEF [World Economic Forum] Competitiveness Report covers 140 countries… ,” Beltran said.
“The greater sin of this series of reports, however, is that methodologically is backward looking, much like trying to figure out which way to go next by looking at the rear view mirror. It uses previous year’s GDP growth, for example, in assigning a score for this year,” he said.
Beltran said even if a country’s growth prospect was negative 8 percent for 2019 but if it was actually 8 percent in 2018, IMD would assign this country in question a high score for the 2019 report.