Quick verification on the posting on TerraceStandard.com

Assalamualaikum and good day to all,

Yup, it's been a while since I last posted anything. It's been a very hectic past three months for me, so now I finally get to write something after so long. 

For those of you on my Facebook, recently I've shared an article I read from www.terracestandard.com (a newspaper based in British Columbia, Canada) titled "We Can't Compete With the Malaysians" which can be found here. After I posted the article, a friend asked whether the statistics comparing Malaysia and Canada were true as there were a few parameters mentioned in that article which showed that Malaysia fared better than Canada according to the World Economic Forum 2015-16 Report. 

So, to ensure the credibility of the article I shared (and my own in the process), I took to Google to check the stats mentioned in the WEF report. So, below is the summary of what I found based on the parameters mentioned in the Terrace Standard article. Please note that the numbers mentioned are each country's position in the Global Competitiveness Index which measures the performance of 140 countries as identified by the WEF unless stated otherwise. 

Parameter	Malaysia	Canada
Goods to market efficiency	6	15
Business sophistication	13	22
Innovation	20	22
Capacity for innovation	7	23
Company spending on R&D	8	26
Gross national savings	24 (29.8% of total GDP)	60 (21.9% of total GDP)
General government debt	92 (57% of total GDP)	120 (86.5% of total GDP)

So yes, based on the WEF report, the figures stated in the Terrace Standard article is correct and we are better than Canada in the abovementioned areas. However, there are some other areas that we can learn from Canada in terms of how we do business and also how we can improve on other areas such as education and public healthcare. 

For those of you who would like to know more on how well Malaysia, Canada and the other 138 countries did in the Global Competitiveness Index, you can download the report at http://www3.weforum.org/docs/gcr/2015-2016/Global_Competitiveness_Report_2015-2016.pdf and perform your own review. 

I hope the above article has been beneficial to you. Cheers and wassalam...

Azim signing off.