CIARA BROWNE
ATTILIO DI BATTISTA
THIERRY GEIGER
TANIA GUTKNECHT
World Economic Forum

Since its first publication in 1979, The Global Competitiveness Report has been used by policymakers, business executives, and academics as a development tool that contributes a valuable portrait of an economy’s productivity and its ability to achieve sustained levels of prosperity and growth. Key to this study, the Executive Opinion Survey (the Survey) is the longest-running and most extensive survey of its kind, capturing the opinions of business leaders around the world on a broad range of topics for which data sources are scarce or, frequently, nonexistent on a global scale. Hence the Survey aims to capture data in particular domains—such as the appetite for entrepreneurial risk, the extent of collaboration within a company or with external entities, and the level of corruption—which makes it an essential complement to the more traditional data provided by international organizations and national statistical offices.

The indicators derived from the Survey are used in the calculation of the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) and other World Economic Forum indexes and reports, including the Networked Readiness Index, the Enabling Trade Index, the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index, the Gender Gap Index, and the Human Capital Index as well as in The Inclusive Economic Growth and Development Report and a number of regional competitiveness studies.

A truly unique source of data, the Survey has also long been used by a number of international and nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and academia for empirical and policy work. For example, Transparency International has been using the Survey data for the elaboration of its Corruption Perceptions Index. Institutions such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Bank, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) also refer to the Forum’s Survey data in their publications, as do a number of academic publications. Finally, an increasing number of countries publish national competitiveness reports that draw on, or refer to, the Survey data.