United States remains most competitive world economy but Denmark finishes first in stress test. - In 2009, the United States remains the most competitive economy in the world followed by Hong Kong (3rd in 2008), Singapore (2nd in 2008) and Switzerland (status quo), according to the world competitiveness scoreboard 2009 set out by the IMD World Competitiveness Center. This year, IMD has added a “stress test”, or test of resistance, to its analysis, comparing the resistance of economies faced with major crisis. This test shows that the most competitive countries are sometimes the most fragile when faced with a crisis situation. Denmark is the country that finishes first in the stress test. The main scoreboard ranks competitiveness in 57 world economies on the basis of 20 criteria broken down into four main groups: economic performance, effectiveness of public authorities, effectiveness of business, and infrastructure. The Scandinavian countries have improved their results or, at worst, maintained their position compared to 2008. Denmark, which ranks 5th, is up one place, Sweden, 6th, is up three places, and Finland jumps from 15th to 9th position. Norway remains in 11th position. The most spectacular movements are notched up by Indonesia, which jumps from 51st to 42nd place, and Estonia which plummets from 23rd to 35th position. Several countries have fallen 10 places compared to last year: - Colombia (51st), Greece (52nd) as well as Taiwan (23rd). Romania (45th) drops nine places; Ireland, 5th in 2000, is now only 19th in 2009. The results of the world economy in the stress test are meagre: - the United States is only 28th and gives way to smaller countries. “Smaller economies are often more fit to adapt and rebound in difficult times”, the study states. Thus, northern Europe and South-East Asia seem to have more assets for recovery in the event of economic recession. In addition, Denmark, Singapore (2nd) have excellent results in this second ranking, followed by Qatar (3rd), Norway (4th), Hong Kong (5th which also does well in the ranking for the most competitive economies), Switzerland (6th - also doing well in the main ranking), Sweden (7th), Australia (8th), Finland (9th) and Malaysia (10th). Among the major exporting nations, China fares the least badly, ranking 20th in the main classification, and 18th for the stress test. As far as the European economies are concerned, the situation is very poor for the United Kingdom (34th), France (44th), Italy (47th) and Spain (50th) which, because of their structural rigidities, do not seem prepared to confront a large-scale crisis. Also, “Russia may not have had enough years of economic growth to consolidate the structure of its economy and to create the necessary buffer to cope with a crisis of this magnitude”. (I.L./transl.jl)