Every year since 1979 the World Economic Forum has conducted the Executive Opinion Survey (EOS). This survey captures invaluable information on a broad range of socio-economic issues. In the 2015 edition, over 13,000 executives in 140 economies were surveyed.⁴ 

The 2015 edition of the EOS, conducted between February and June 2015, included a question on the risks of highest concern for the second time. More specifically, respondents were asked to select the five global risks that they believe to be of most concern for doing business in their country within the next 10 years.

The list of 28 global risks presented in the EOS is derived from the list of global risks of The Global Risks Report 2015 and is almost similar to the global risks of The Global Risks Report 2016 (see Appendix B for the differences in global risks between the two editions). The size and nature of the EOS and the GRPS respondents differed significantly: they comprised a multistakeholder group of experts in the case of the GRPS and business executives in the case of the EOS. The EOS results provide a complementary perspective – that of businesses on the impact of global risks on their businesses. 

Formally, for each country j the share of respondents selecting each global risk i is: 

where N_j is the sample size of the country j and n_i,j is the number of respondents who selected the risk i in their five global risks of highest concern for doing business in country j. C_i,j is the share of respondents who selected risk i in country j. 

Interested readers can visit the portal at http://wef.ch/risks2016 to access the results for individual economies and regions.