You'll Be Surprised Where Malaysia Is Ranked In the 2016 Innovation Index
FilePic: ChannelNewsAsia
No, we are not number one yet but Malaysia is placed ahead of Italy, Spain and even Hong Kong in the 2016 Innovation Index.
Malaysia even made it into the top half of the fifty most innovative economies in the world, coming in at No. 25.
Who grabbed the top spot? Surprisingly it wasn't a European nation or the world's largest economy, USA but South Korea.
In this year's index, the countries were rated by the performance of their economies using factors including research and development spending and concentration of high-tech public companies, Bloomberg reports on 19 January.
Pic: Bloomberg
South Korea got the highest scores for value-added services in its manufacturing industry while its R&D, high-tech density and patent activity was also ranked highly.
"South Korea is squeezed between low-wage China on the one hand and more technologically advanced Japan on the other, so there's this sense of anxiety, or a certain degree of urgency, about maintaining this performance," an economic analyst, Marcus Noland, observed about this country's urgency to strive to stand out from the increasingly crowded field in Asia.
"Emphasis on wages being determined by tenure and seniority, together with a lack of pension mobility, means that there's not that much inter-firm or inter-sectoral movement of people," Noland said, Bloomberg reports.
A closer look at the ranking chart also shows that South Korea is four points ahead of the traditional innovation powerhouse of Germany while the USA came in at 8th spot. Six of the top 10 economies are European nations, while Asia contributed 3 countries, with Singapore and Japan making up the other two.
The full list of the 50 most innovative world economies are shown below:
Pic: Bloomberg
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