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Canada, USA Slide in 2012 Global Competitiveness Rankings

The World Economic Forum has released its annual ranking of global competitiveness, and once again Switzerland has retained the top spot. However, the shifting of other countries and regions within the index may provide messages about larger global economic trends and the varying impact of financial uncertainty. The United States falls from 4th place last year to 5th this year, having been passed by Finland. Canada slides from 10th to 12th, passed by both the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. Other rising countries in the top 10 include Singapore, the Netherlands and Germany. As with previous years, Scandinavian countries continue to perform well, holding the #3 (Sweden), #4 (Finland), #8 (Denmark) and #16 (Norway) positions. Click here for the full list.

While such rankings are always debatable, they can be a good indicator of larger growth and trade patterns, and helpful to those seeking to develop investment attraction and FDI initiatives. For example, the UK’s rise up the list is paralleled by its increasing importance as a market for Canadian goods; exports from Canada to the UK have more than doubled in the past 5 years.

However, slipping North American scores are a potential cause for alarm, and some US-based organizations are beginning to act to reverse the trend. Earlier this month, the Virginia-based Centre for Public Policy Innovation (CPPI) released its first special report on Restoring US Competitiveness, which can be downloaded here. Among a range of public policy options, it considers changes to U.S. taxation and immigration policies to help boost American competitiveness.

New Tools for Urban Network Analysis

There’s no doubt that the world is becoming increasingly urban. In developing nations, population growth often outstrips the pace of responsible planning, and haphazardly designed cities, potentially even informal slums, emerge to contain the growth. In more developed economies there is still a need to establish urban spaces that alleviate congestion, pollution, and other problems associated with today’s densely populated cities. It is clear that decision makers need access to a range of more innovative tools to assess the structure of cities and develop policies to respond to identified challenges, including accommodating influxes of new residents. Fast Company recently profiled a new spatial analysis tool with the potential to do just that.

Released by the City Form Research Group at MIT, the Urban Network Analysis (UNA) tool is open-source software based on ESRI’s ArcGIS ArcToolbox user interface. Aimed at urban designers, architects, planners, geographers and spatial analysts, the UNA toolbox measures factors like reach, gravity, betweeness, closeness, and straightness in an effort to provide insight into the interactions happening throughout the urban environment. Though most network analysis tools rely on nodes and edges of street vectors and building polygons, the UNA tool adds a third element associated with buildings – weighing factors that signify accessibility, size, population, or other broad factors of attractiveness. For example, the UNA tool allows planners and decision makers to assess the proximity and ease of access that city neighbourhoods have to areas and buildings with the highest densities of employment. Fast Company provided the map above for the “reach” of Cambridge, MA, with red neighbourhoods signifying neighbourhoods with the best access to areas with employment concentrations. It is innovative, free, open-source tools like this that will better assist planners and decision makers with policy development that will accommodate increasingly urban populations. If you have ArcGIS 10 software with the ArcGIS Network Analyst Extension, you can download the UNA toolbox here.

Mapping Community Stories

Stories have been called the “DNA of culture.” Every place has its stories, and if the stories are not shared, the place is of diminished interest to residents and visitors alike. The Blarney Stone, for instance, is just a rock without its mythologies and cultural context. Much of the attention to cultural mapping has focused on mapping tangible cultural resources – the cultural enterprises, facilities, festivals and events, cultural heritage, etc. But the other half of cultural mapping is mapping the intangibles – the stories in communities that say something important about its unique identity and sense of place.

Until recently we've lacked some of the tools needed to enable these community stories to be communicated to a wide audience. New web-based tools, however, are supporting these efforts. An example of how such tools can be used is the My City Lives project in Toronto, which geo-tags videos to an interactive map of the city. My City Lives aims to give life to places in Toronto by attaching stories and experiences to them. Similarly, History Pin, which we profiled In a recent issue of TINAN, allows anyone to post images, stories, videos easily to tell the story of that place. Another program worth looking at is WhatWasThere.com, which uses Google Street View to enable people to upload images of that street through time using historical photographs to illustrate the changes in the streetscape. These emerging tools are certainly worth watching for their potential to enable communities to tell important stories about local culture.

The Impact of SMBs

Sometimes, we forget about the importance of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to our local economies and become focused on attracting the "big players". While it's important to continue to focus on attracting new investment to bolster local economies, we can't overlook the significant impact of SMBs, both locally and globally. According to this infographic, SMBs employ the majority of the world's workers and help to drive innovation. In Ghana, for example, a group of aspiring web entrepreneurs are trying to turn Accra into a tech startup hub. The importance of SMBs is part of what has driven the creation of the Start-up America Partnership in the USA. Start-up America, which we wrote about in a previous issue of TINAN, is now open for business and will provide a range of resources for entrepreneurs in the US. A similar program also exists in the UK.