Fareed Zakaria is a good journalist. But he’s also human. In his Washington Post column yesterday, Zakaria concludes that President Obama has a stronger case to make for his economic prescriptions than does Governor Romney. However, that conclusion—at least as presented in the column—is premised on a misreading of some recently published data.
Zakaria distills President Obama’s message down to the belief that investment in infrastructure, education, training, basic sciences, and technologies of the future are key to economic recovery, while Romney argues that relief from taxes and excessive regulatory burdens is the answer.
While both views have merit in Zakaria’s estimation, Obama has the stronger case. Why? Because Romney is barking about a relatively insignificant problem, concludes Zakaria:
We need a tax and regulatory structure that creates strong incentives for businesses to flourish. The thing is, we already have one.
To support that claim, Zakaria cites a figure from the 2011-12 edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report that ranks the United States 5th (out of 142 countries) and concludes that “whether compared with our own past—of, say, 30 years ago—or with other countries, the United States has become more business-friendly.” The problem is that he’s citing the wrong number and, thus, reaching the wrong conclusion.
The United States is ranked 5th on the overall global competitiveness index, which is a weighted value reflecting scores assigned for 12 broad criteria presumed to affect “competitiveness,” including: (1) institutions, (2) infrastructure, (3) macroeconomic environment, (4) health and primary education, (5) higher education and training, (6) goods market efficiency, (7) labor market efficiency, (8) financial market development, (9) technological readiness, (10) market size, (11) business sophistication, and (12) innovation. U.S. scores on regulations and taxes contribute to that final ranking, but 5th is not where the United States ranks on those criteria.