No, because your country doesn’t gaf about innovation; just raising earnings for shareholders. Innovation isn’t required to do that.

No, it looks like a DC-based think tank. I think that they’re aiming to talk to an American audience and to grab their attention by starting off giving an impression that US business performance isn’t competitive. The problem is that, as I point out in my top-level comment, it would be kind of unexpected if the US sat at the very top or bottom of a ranked list of smaller countries, because as long as whatever index metric he’s using can vary from country to country, you’d expect larger countries to be relatively-closer to the center of a distribution, all else held equal. So whatever policy he’s trying to promote (“more business infrastructure”?) he’s either leading with:

• A mathematical error, which doesn’t really make me enthusiastic about spending time on reading through his argument.

• An intentionally-dishonest argument, which makes me even less-enthusiastic.

It’s like that “evolution doesn’t happen because nothing is living in your peanut butter jar” guy. Either he’s probably not in a position to be giving people advice, or he’s intentionally aiming to mislead them, and either way, his arguments probably are not really worth my time.

If he had a sound argument to make, I’d kind of expect him to have made that argument instead.