I subscribe to an RSS feed for a blog known as the "New Economist", a fellow who posts on "New economic research, data, events and analysis.." A post he made back in November was called Who’s on top?, dealing with international competiveness and recent rankings by the Economist (the magazine not the author), World Economic Forum etc. I won’t redo his analysis here but what I find particularly fascinating about these sorts of rankings is how the high tax Nordic economies have percolated up to the top for one and secondly how New Zealand, a country that went virtually bankrupt due to over regulation and "planning" has now restructured itself such that it regularly tops these lists. What will be interesting (for people that are interested in such things) is how NZ moves forward from here. I recently read an article in the NZ Herald on their agricultural production that stated basically that they were farming every square inch that could be farmed and had maxed out their agricultural production so where do they go next?