The new position in the IMD ranking
South Korea ranks tenth out of 70 countries in a global ranking of digital and artificial intelligence competitiveness, according to an announcement Wednesday by Seoul's Ministry of Science, as reported by the Korea Herald. The figure marks an advance of eight places compared with the previous year. The ranking is contained in a report published by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), a business school based in Switzerland, as specified by the ministry itself.
The most significant change is not only the absolute position but the speed of the recovery: a gain of eight places in a year indicates a relative improvement compared with a broad group of economies in the comparison. The material, however, does not specify which indicators drove the overall shift or how much weight the different criteria carried: this is a point that remains to be verified in the full report.
At the top, the ranking has the United States in first place, up from the fourth position it held a year earlier. Canada, which held first place, falls to fifth this year. The overtaking between the top two economies is therefore one of the central elements of the picture described.
The comparison in the Asia-Pacific region
In the Asia-Pacific context, the material places Singapore in second place, China in seventh and Japan in nineteenth. Against these benchmarks, South Korea in tenth place is positioned behind Singapore and China but ahead of Japan, according to the data cited by the ministry.
The comparison among these four countries is useful for reading the ranking in relative terms: tenth place is not isolated but fits into a regional ranking in which the top positions are occupied by Singapore and, higher up, by the United States. The material does not clarify whether and how the four countries in the region are distributed across the individual subcategories.
The subcategories and the government's interpretation
By category, South Korea ranks third in indicators relating to technological infrastructure and efficiency. It is first in research and development spending as a share of gross domestic product and eighth in the artificial intelligence adaptation index, according to the ministry.
These are data describing distinct aspects: the first item concerns infrastructure and efficiency, the second the intensity of research investment relative to the economy, and the third the capacity to adopt artificial intelligence. The material does not specify how these results combine in the overall score that determines tenth place.
The Ministry of Science attributes the overall rise to the government's policy efforts and the country's resilience, and commits to rapidly implementing the main policies on artificial intelligence and digital technology. This is a statement by the executive, not an independent assessment contained in the report: the causal relationship between the cited policies and the improvement in the ranking is not quantified in the available material. It therefore remains to be verified, in the IMD report, which components contributed to the jump and to what extent.
