An analysis of infrastructure development based on national competitiveness perspectives

Development of the infrastructure is one of the key factors in determining the competitiveness of a nation. Most world competitiveness reports include infrastructure development as a primary set of indicators in assessing the competitiveness of nations. We ranked the indicators based on their performances in terms of not only standard deviations but also leading and falling-behind groups classified by the cluster analysis. The discriminant competitiveness graphic-based representation of the indicator performance allowed policy makers to formulate infrastructure strategies. Simulated experiments based on the competitiveness data of Canada, Taiwan and Thailand also demonstrated that such ranking resulted in a better selection of weak indicators for improvement.