By Cho Jin-seo

Korea slipped by three places to 22nd among 139 nations in the 2010 economic competitiveness rankings of the World Economic Forum.

The annual rankings, released on Thursday, showed that there is a wide gap between official economic indices and actual business sentiment here.

Many statistical properties of the rankings, such as the budget balance, savings rate, and infrastructure, have improved from last year. On the other hand, most of the aspects based on surveys fell, showing that businessmen have become more pessimistic about Korea’s economic and political environment over the past year.

“It seems that the benefit of economic recovery is not reaching small businesses,” an official of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance said Thursday in an unofficial briefing on the WEF report.

Compared to last year, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Luxemburg climbed past Korea in the rankings of the 139 nations. Switzerland kept its position as the most business-competitive nation in the world in the rankings, followed by Sweden and Singapore.

The United States, Germany and Japan placed fourth, fifth and sixth in the rankings, which are mostly dominated by European countries in the top tiers.

For Korea, the problem was the qualitative part of the rankings. The rankings on “public trust of politicians” dropped to 105th this year from 67th last year. “Ease of access to bank loans” was also poorly rated, losing 38 points to be ranked 118th.

Yet it was ranked sixth, up five notches from last year, in “macroeconomic stability,” which is based on quantitative factors such as the budget balance and national savings rate.

Because of a lack of objectivity in these areas, the ministry official said that the WEF rankings should not be given much significance.

Among the 111 research criteria, 80 are based on a survey done on the students and alumni of the management school at KAIST, a Daejeon-based university, from February to May. Among more than 3,000 people asked to fill in the torturing survey, only 130 returned it to the WEF, he said.

“Frankly speaking, I wish we could stop doing this briefing on the WEF report from next year,” he said.

Another official said that the ministry’s liaison officer in Geneva, where the WEF is located, asked the organization about its credibility. “The answer was that they believe the rankings were statistically significant, because it is done in so many countries” he said.

The officials were especially skeptical on certain criteria where the respondents rated the country one of the worst in the world. For example, the ratings said Korea is only 85th in terms of safety considering the risk of “organized crime” in businesses, which is unlikely to be true except for ones making money from alcohol sales and prostitution.

The worst of all was the “cooperation in labor-employer relations,” where it was the second from the bottom among the 139 countries.

“This is like saying that we are the worst place in the world as for labor relationships. I don’t think we are actually that bad,” the official said. “I only suspect that Koreans have a tendency of being too fussy when evaluating ourselves.”

The finance ministry has given press briefings on the WEF report every year as well as a similar one from IMD, a business school in Switzerland. There, Korea was ranked 23rd this May. But in many areas, the two reports indicated contradictory results on Korea, the officials said.