We produce a yearly ranking of government competitiveness, striving for reliability through an emphasis on objective research and a thorough accounting for each country’s unique context. This approach avoids the common assumption in government competitiveness rankings that all other factors are equal. Each country has a unique history and politico-administrative system, and these elements play an often incalculable role in competitiveness. Additionally, the Center’s ranking uses time as a key variable. Time not only reveals performance patterns throughout a government’s history, but also provides an important longer-term perspective to support future recommendations. By taking both context and time into account, un-comparable governance elements become comparable.
The principal goal of ranking competitiveness is not to evaluate what a government has achieved in the past, but to identify and justify policy recommendations for increasing competitiveness in the future. This approach assumes that government should be pragmatic and judicious in developing strategies under resource constraints, while at the same time responsibly fulfilling its role within the greater national society. Developing countries often struggle with more resource and governance constraints than do developed countries. As such, the Center gives rigorous consideration to the unique circumstances of developing countries, an approach lacking in most other competitiveness rankings. The Center does not assume that there is a uniformly applicable path to economic development. Rather, its advice contextualizes representative examples of rapid development to the particular challenges of each case.
