Singapore lost its crown as the world's most digitally competitive country

The ranking of its attitudes towards tech adoption is low.

Singapore fell out of its status as the most digitally competitive country in the world after being overtaken by the US in IMD’s World Digital Competitiveness Rankings for 2018.

The rankings took into consideration every country’s performance on three factors: knowledge, technology, and future readiness. Singapore reached first place in the knowledge and technology factors but 15th in future readiness.

“Seemingly, despite Singapore’s high level of training and education, and an environment conducive to digitalization, society’s attitudes toward the adoption of technologies and the agility of business to take advantage of digital transformation, are relatively low (20th and 18th respectively),” IMD said.

Amongst knowledge subfactors, IMD identified Singapore’s top weaknesses as its total public expenses on education, lack of female researchers, R&D productivity by publication, and scientific & technical employment. Top strengths include educational assessment for math, high educational achievement, its science graduates and high-tech patent grants.

Singapore performed poorly in its immigration laws but excelled in its high-tech exports for the technology factor.

The lion city appeared to have average performance across future readiness subfactors. It performed relatively well for its e-government, public-private partnerships, and cybersecurity and just average for smartphone possession, internet retailing, and agility of companies.