With India improving its ranking in World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) competitiveness index, the government has expressed hopes that the country will show similar performance in World Bank's ease of doing business ranking, which may lead to upgrade of the country’s sovereign ratings.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said that though global credit rating agencies follow their own procedure they will certainly take into account the 16-point jump in India's ranking in the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Index. As per latest edition of the Global Competitiveness Report released by WEF, India's competitiveness improved the fastest in 2015-16, and the country climbed 16 places to the 39th rank among 138 countries in the index. India was ranked 130th among 189 countries in the ease of doing business rankings 2016
Jaitley said the WEF report indicates that if there is a possible implementation of the GST in 2017 then that part of negative categorisation with regard to goods market itself would get adequately taken into consideration. Jaitley said 'keeping the popular aspirations, the reform agenda of the government, a possible continuous improvement in the goods market through the GST and steps in the digital India space, I am sure that this momentum would continue.” He added that the areas like health care and education where they need to do a lot more in order to further move up as far as this agenda is concerned.
With regard to India's information and communications technology (ICT), he said that the WEF report indicates that the ranking is likely to move up on ongoing effective implementation of Digital India. India’s competitiveness has improved this year across the board, in particular in goods market efficiency, business sophistication and innovation. The macroeconomic environment also improved due to better monetary and fiscal policies and lower oil prices.