About the Global Competitiveness Index

Competitiveness is defined as the set of institutions, policies and factors that determine a country’s level of productivity. The level of productivity, in turn, sets the level of prosperity that can be reached by an economy. Since 2005, the World Economic Forum has based its competitiveness analysis on the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), a comprehensive framework that measures the microeconomic and macroeconomic foundations of national competitiveness, grouped into 12 categories.

To produce The Global Competitiveness Report, as well as other regional and industry benchmarking reports, the World Economic Forum relies on a large set of data sourced from international organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, and from its own annual Executive Opinion Survey. The Survey captures invaluable information on a broad range of economic and social factors, for which data sources are non-existent, too scarce, unreliable, or outdated. In 2014, the Survey captured the opinions of over 13,000 business executives.