The analysis was carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and includes a number of factors important to the IT industry’s competitiveness in each country. The factors include an ample supply of skills, an innovation-friendly culture, world-class technology infrastructure, a robust legal regime and well-balanced government support, not to mention a competition-friendly business environment, writes a press release.

Those countries possessing most of these “competitiveness enablers” are also home to high-performance IT industries: all but four of the top 22 countries in the Economist Intelligence Unit index are also among the world's top countries in terms of IT labour productivity.

On the strength of its unique combination of scale and quality in the key areas that promote IT competitiveness, the US tops the index table. Asia-Pacific countries are well-represented, with Japan, South Korea and Australia among the top five index performers. The UK heads the ranks of European countries, closely followed by Sweden and Denmark.

All, however, face stark challenges in the effort to remain competitive: chief among them are ensuring a steady supply of talent for the industry, and securing the right level of support from government to promote competition and innovation.

The 20 best ranked countries in the analysis of IT competitiveness worldwide are:

1 USA 77.4
2 Japan 72.7
3 South Korea 67.2
4 Great Britain 67.1
5 Australia 66.5
6 Taiwan 65.8
7 Sweden 65.4
8 Denmark 64.9
9 Canada 64.6
10 Switzerland 63.5
11 Singapore 63.1
12 Holland 62.9
13 Finland 62.7
14 Norway 59.7
15 Ireland 58.6
16 Germany 58.2
17 New Zealand 57.5
18 France 55.8
19 Austria 55.3
20 Israel 54.5