Since around the end of the 1970s, the World Economic Forum in Davos began highlighting competitiveness to attract the attention of world leaders, by defining the term, explaining the importance of competitiveness and seeking to measure it through the Global Competitiveness Index and publishing the Global Competitiveness Report on an annual basis. Its attention to this matter extended to the establishment of the Global Competitiveness Agenda Council within the framework of the Forum, which is tasked with defining competitiveness, providing world leaders with its tools and providing a communication network for those who seek to increase the competitive capabilities that their countries, cities and institutions possess.

The Global Competitiveness Agenda Council's Cities Competitiveness Report, based on the fact that cities are the main engine of productivity and growth, and an essential element in the competitiveness of countries, included in its latest edition, in 2014. <The Cities Competitiveness Report issued by the Global Competitiveness Agenda Council, based on the premise that cities are the main driver of productivity and growth, and an essential element in the competitiveness of countries, included in its latest edition for 2014, multiple case studies covering (26) medium-sized cities in five continents of the world, including in the Middle East region, Medina, which was reviewed in the report within the framework of visualizing the potential of the presence of the Knowledge Economic City - one of the economic cities proposed by the Investment Commission - to enhance the competitiveness of the city in the vicinity of Al-Madinah. The report points out that millions of Muslims come to Medina throughout the year, during the Hajj season and during their arrival for Umrah, and therefore the universities and scientific centers in Medina will host conferences and seminars, which will qualify it to attract more visitors from all over the world, which leads, as the report expects, to huge investments in residential and commercial projects with intellectual activity, and the mobility associated with conferences and the large number of visitors to the Prophet's Mosque becomes an attraction for the user

<The report, despite the smallness of what it addressed on the subject of the competitiveness of Medina, and considering it only as a case study among twenty-six other case studies, was welcomed and praised for what it included and expressed in this aspect, in a way that I believe it does not deserve, for several reasons, the most prominent and important of which is that Tayyiba, with its high religious and spiritual value among all the cities of the world, is not deserving of it. with its high religious and spiritual value among all the cities of the world for us Muslims is too high for us to subject it to the standards of competitiveness of cities from whatever source those standards come from, the second reason is that in dealing with Medina as a case study, the report was mostly focused on the Knowledge Economic City and its potential impact on the competitiveness of Medina, while the origin is otherwise, as the proximity of the Knowledge Economic City to Medina is actually what gave the Knowledge City the competitive potential, compared to its counterparts in other economic cities, and therefore the Knowledge Economic City should have been the focus of the case study and not the city of Al-Mustafa, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, the other and not the last reason, from my perspective, that the report does not deserve the praise that it received is that the Kingdom in that part of the report that concerns Medina was not spared from being negatively exposed - -either explicitly or implicitly, by those who commissioned the report.

Sulaiman Al-Ruwaished
Riyadh newspaper