Malta ranks high in information society, poorly in sustainable development

Malta is outperforming a number of EU countries in areas like the information society and social inclusion, according to a report drawn up by the World Economic Forum.

The report, 'The Lisbon Review 2004', published yesterday, shows Malta however lagging behind in areas like sustainable development and innovation and research and development.

The WEF has ranked Malta in fourth place among the EU accession countries, and with a general score of 4.2 on the Lisbon criteria scale. It is still lower than the EU average of 4.97.

The report assesses the progress made by EU member countries and the acceding and candidate countries in the far-reaching goals of the Lisbon Strategy of economic and structural reforms.

Within the various categories, the assessment of Europe's competitive environment is based on publicly available hard data, as well as data from the executive opinion survey, drawn up thanks to interviews with business leaders. The results found that a majority of European countries fail to match the US on competitiveness. Most were struggling to fulfil the EU's own Lisbon criteria on competitiveness and the top accession countries were more competitive than some EU members.

In fact, the strongest of the accession countries are better prepared to compete along the lines of the Lisbon dimensions than the weakest of the existing EU member countries, taken by issue-area.

Estonia is ranked first among accession countries by the Lisbon criteria.

Among Estonia's specific strengths are the quality of its enterprise environment and the level of sophistication of information society elements present in its economy, both areas in which it scores above the EU average.

Slovenia is ranked second among accession countries with relative strengths in the dimensions of network industries and sustainable development.

When contacted, the WEF senior economist and report co-author, Jennifer Blanke said that Malta was performing "reasonably well" overall.

Malta polled the highest score among the candidate countries in the area of social inclusion, performing better than countries like Germany, Spain and Italy.

This area took into consideration factors like returning people to the workforce, the quality of schools, and the availability of jobs for women.

In social inclusion, Ms Blanke explained, Malta was measured as doing particularly well in maternity leave legislation, quality of maths and science education, overall quality of the educational system (for competitiveness), lack of disparity in the quality of healthcare between rich and poor, government effectiveness in reducing poverty, and income inequality.

With a score of 5.27, Malta was considered as a good performer in the financial services sector, scoring better than Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece.

In this sector, Malta was seen as being comparatively strong in the soundness of banks, property rights, local equity market access and the regulation of securities exchanges.

The Czech Republic, with a score of 5.19, was perceived to be strong in network industries. In the information society area, Malta ranks better than Ireland, Spain and Italy.

One area where Malta gets a noticeably bad report is in sustainable development, where it achieves a score of 3.24, way below the EU average of 5.16.

The report comments that it is particularly concerning that the largest of the acceding countries, Poland, performs poorly across all dimensions.

Comparing the three best-performing accession countries to the four worst-performing EU countries for each dimension, accession countries do better than the EU countries virtually across the board, with the exception of completing the single market and telecommunications, where differences are quite small.

Four years after EU leaders declared their desire to make the EU the most dynamic, knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010, many countries are struggling to make progress, the report notes.

The study found that the three Nordic countries - Finland, Denmark and Sweden - are outperforming the US in many areas. It also points out that while much has been achieved, numerous challenges remain and policy-makers in Europe will have to refocus their energies on accelerating the pace of reforms.

Finland is the most competitive economy as measured by the Lisbon criteria, followed by Denmark and Sweden.

The UK has the highest rank outside the Nordic countries and among the four EU members of the G-7.

Cyprus did not form part of the study.