About the Executive Opinion Survey

For the fourth time, the 2017 edition of the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey (EOS) included a question on the risks of highest concern for doing business, the results of which are presented as interactive data visualization tools on The Global Risks Report 2018 web reader.

The World Economic Forum has conducted this survey every year since 1979 to capture the opinions of business leaders on a broad range of socio-economic issues. The 2017 edition of the EOS, available in 39 languages, captured the views of 14,375 business executives from over 148 economies between February and June 2017. Following the data editing process, a total of 12,775 responses from 133 economies were retained.

For more information about the Executive Opinion Survey, please refer to Appendix C of The Global Competitiveness Report 2017-2018.

Differences between the EOS and the GRPS

The list of 29 global risks presented in the EOS was derived from previous editions of the Global Risks Report and is similar to the list of global risks in The Global Risks Report 2018. However, the number and nature of the EOS and the Global Risks Perception Survey (GRPS) respondents differ significantly: in the case of the GRPS, respondents comprise a multistakeholder group of experts in economics, environment, geopolitics, society, technology, risk management, and other fields; in the case of the EOS, they are exclusively business executives. Furthermore, the EOS asks respondents to select the five risks that they are most concerned will affect doing business in their country, whereas the GRPS asks respondents about their views of the global impact of each risk and the likelihood of each risk occurring. Both the EOS and the GRPS ask participants to rate risks using a 10 year time horizon.

Calculation

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

where Nj is the sample size of country j and ni,j is the number of respondents who selected the risk i as one of their five global risks of highest concern for doing business in country j. Ci,j is the share of respondents who selected risk i in country j.