Tech Roundup: Brazil loses digital competitiveness

Welcome to our Tech Roundup, where we bring you the biggest stories in technology and innovation in Brazil and Latin America. This week: Brazil’s performance in this year’s IMD World Digital Competitiveness Ranking worsened.

Brazil drops five places in global digital competitiveness ranking

Brazil returned to 57th place in the latest World Digital Competitiveness Ranking (WDC) from the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), the same position as in 2018 and 2019.

KPIs. The World Digital Competitiveness Ranking measures the ability of countries to adopt digital technologies and their capacity to adapt to the new global context. In Brazil, the study is conducted with the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center of the Fundação Dom Cabral (FDC).

Methodology. Three main factors are analyzed for the WDC ranking: knowledge, technology, and future readiness. Each of these factors is divided into three sub-factors consisting of 54 criteria.

• The criteria can be hard data (e.g., internet bandwidth speed and smartphone penetration) or soft data (e.g., companies’ agility in adopting new technologies).

State of play. Brazil lost positions not only because it is worse in some of the analysis criteria, but also because the top ten countries — led by the U.S., the Netherlands, and Singapore — are improving and distancing themselves from the rest of the list.

By the numbers. Among the items in which Brazil performed worse — and which dragged down the country’s overall score — are international experience of the workforce (63rd),...