Most And Least Competitive Economies

News from the world:

Switzerland knocked the United States off the position as the world's most competitive economy as the crash of the U.S. banking system left it more exposed to some long-standing weaknesses, a report said on Tuesday.

I met a guy from Switzerland here; he was kind of weird. Smart, I think, but weird.

The WEF study named African countries Zimbabwe and Burundi as the world's least competitive economies.

I also met met a Zimbabwean. Nice guy. His country, though, has a few problems:

In the case of Zimbabwe, the WEF noted the complete absence of property rights, corruption, basic government inefficiency as well as macroeconomic instability as fundamental flaws.

"[C]omplete absence of property rights" gets me every time. But we shouldn't be so quick to judge: according to the prestigious African Studies Quarterly, Zimbabwe's "alternative structures of property rights" (how deliciously euphemistic) are such that "[the] writer does not believe that we are ready to be property rights engineers or even if we should be".

African Studies Quarterly, meet Cato.