What do the competitiveness indicators tell us about economic performance?

This paper presents an extensive statistical investigation of the relationship between economic performance and the Global Competitiveness Index as a possible predictor of economic development. The analysis is based on a large sample of countries at various level of economic development. Various measures of both competitiveness indicators based on the data published by the World Economic Forum and economic performance indicators are employed. The results obtained from the panel analysis show that, on average, the relationship between economic performance and competitiveness indicators is weak. However, when we differentiate among the economies according to their economic level we are able to identify some statistically significant relationships between economic performance and certain measures of competitiveness. The results show that in many cases the probability of inferring systematically wrong expectations about economic performance given the information contained in the competitiveness indices is high.