Inventing the Global Competitiveness Race: The World Economic Forum, the IMD and the Neoliberal Benchmarking Tool They Created

This article offers a historical analysis of the World Competitiveness Index, which the World Economic Forum (WEF) developed after 1979 and continued to produce for four decades, partly in collaboration with the International Institute for Management Development. It examines the conceptualisation of this global performance indicator (GPI), the institutional and methodological choices that were made and the underlying neoliberal theoretical views on which it was based. A case study on the use of the competitiveness indicator in the context of the newly established European Union at the beginning of the 1990s helps to show how business groups (the European Round Table of Industrialists and the Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe) relied on this quantification of competitiveness to make policy recommendations that mirrored their economic interests. Competitiveness was used as a performative notion to support policies that came of the toolbox of neoliberalism, above all the deregulation of the labour market. Finally, the contestation of the WEF’s flagship indicator by leading economists is discussed. Overall, the article contributes to existing research on the increasing use of GPIs by allowing for a better understanding of the role played by business actors in producing and circulating neoliberal indicators and by calling attention to their implications regarding lacking democratic oversight making them vulnerable to attempts of corruption.