The World Economic Forum (WEF) released it’s 2019 Global Competitiveness Report this week. Unfortunately, Mongolia’s ranking in the report dropped 3 places to 102 out of 144 countries subject to the study.

Mongolia scored 52.6 overall in the annual assessment based on WEF’s Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), which maps the competitiveness landscape of economies through 103 indicators organized into 12 “pillars”. These pillars are: Institutions, Infrastructure; ICT adoption; Macroeconomic stability; Health; Skills; Product market; Labour market; Financial system; Market size; Business dynamism; and Innovation capability. For each indicator, the index uses a scale from 0 to 100 and the final score shows how close an economy is to the ideal state or “frontier” of competitiveness.

Mongolia scored highest in “Macro-Economic Stability” and in “Labor Market”, scoring 67 and 64 of out 100 in each respectively. Mongolia’s lowest scoring pillar was “Innovation capability”.

Individual pillars where Mongolia gained the most this year are ICT Adoption, and Macro-Economic Stability which both gained two points over the previous year.

Contributing to Mongolia’s drop 3 ranks this year are lower economic strength in small and medium enterprises and issues in the debt market leading to a rise in bad loans.

According to the report, Mongolia’s GDP per capita is about USD $4,026 per year, up nearly $400 per person from 2018’s GDP per capita of ~$3,639 as estimated by WEF.