Competitiveness

BusinessWeek asks, "Is the U.S. Losing Its Edge in Tech?"

But their online article doesn't include an obvious link to the actual report from the Economic Intelligence Unit, sponsored by the Business Software Alliance. It's titled, How technology sectors grow: benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008", which tells you a little about their mindset.

Both the detailed data and their chosen methodology are interesting, though I haven't had time to digest them yet. The top 21 in their total index:

1. U.S.
2. Taiwan
3. U.K.
4. Sweden
5. Denmark
6. Canada
7. Australia
8. South Korea
9. Singapore
10. Netherlands
11. Switzerland
12. Japan
13. Finland
14. Norway
15. Ireland
16. Israel
17. New Zealand
18. Austria
19. Germany
20. France
21. Hong Kong

India, Russia, and China are 48, 49, and 50.

The disparities in "human capital" and "R&D environment" are interesting.

Even more telling are the drops from last year's index -- Japan fell from 2nd to 12th, South Korea from 3rd to 8th, due at least partly to shifts in their methodology. As always in some ranking system, you can engineer the results to fit your intuition :-).