The World's Most Competitive Countries

Half of the top 10 are European and the U.S. is still No. 1, but Asia's tigers are coming on strong.

Asian economies are overtaking the U.S. and Northern Europe to become the most competitive in the world.

Among the top 20 economies out of the 55 ranked, those in Asia-Pacific posted the greatest gains compared with last year.

IMD produced the rankings using 331 criteria ranging from gross domestic product growth and unemployment to the number of Internet users and the price of local cell-phone calls. Hard data from sources such as the World Bank and U.N. comprised two-thirds of the inputs; the rest came from nearly 4,000 survey responses from executives in each country regarding the availability of skilled employees, government regulation, the availability of venture capital, and other more qualitative issues.

See BW's slide show of the top dozen countries in this year's IMD competitiveness ranking.
Table: The World's Most Competitive Countries 2008