BRIEFS: Business

Panama moves up one spot in WEF ranking

Panama rose one position in the overall index of competitiveness produced by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which was released yesterday.

In 2007 Panama ranked 59th, while this year it rose to 58th.

“We are the second best country in Latin America, we are only behind Chile,” noted Diego Eleta, former president of the Cámara de Comercio, Industrias y Agricultura.

This year Panama was ranked above Mexico, which was in front of Panama in 2007, and again ranked higher than Costa Rica. Up until 2007, that country had been ranked ahead of Panama.

Among the 134 countries evaluated, Panama received excellent scores in property rights, financial markets, infrastructure and macroeconomic stability.

But it was ranked among the worst countries in the world in quality of education (108), judicial independence (115) and rigidity in the labor regime (126), among others.

In the 3rd annual National Competitiveness Forum, an event that was held yesterday at the Hotel Playa Bonita, the firm GfK Marketing Group presented the results of the survey and confirmed some of the trends identified by the WEF.

“The main obstacles to competitiveness that employers identified in this survey were corruption, weaknesses in education, the labor code and the cost of energy,” said Domingo Barrios, general manager of GfK.