The World Economic Forum just issued the current Global Competitiveness Report (2013-2014). The study is one of the most dense and complex assessments of national economies. It also pretends to rate nations on which very little data is available. That may be why Chad ends up at the bottom of the list of 148 countries, along with several other nations for which no solid data has been available recently, and in some cases has not been for years.
The Global Competitiveness Report continues to use its "12 Pillars of Competitiveness" for rating all nations. The authors write:
We define competitiveness as the set of institutions, policies, and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country. The level of productivity, in turn, sets the level of prosperity that can be reached by an economy. The productivity level also determines the rates of return obtained by investments in an economy, which in turn are the fundamental drivers of its growth rates. In other words, a more competitive economy is one that is likely to grow faster over time.
States Profiting the Most from Sin
The names and the descriptions of the Pillars are so hard to understand that a reading of the methodology of the Global Competitiveness Report will exhaust most readers before they can get to the important parts of the report. They are, in order: Institutions, Infrastructure, Macroeconomic Environment, Health and Primary Education, Higher Education and Training, Goods Market Efficiency, Labor Market Efficiency, Financial Market Development, Technical Readiness, Market Size, Business Sophistication, and Innovation.
Countries with homogenous populations and governments that directly support both business and the economic welfare do well in the Global Competitiveness Report, as they do in much of the research from other agencies like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Switzerland tops the list, followed by Singapore. All of the Scandinavian nations, which are rich and benevolent, are very near the top -- Finland, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The countries that have been at the top of the of the economic and financial leadership in the developed world are all there too -- Germany, the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom. Each of the nations at or near the top of the list has a sophisticated ability to gather huge sums of data on its economic activity and details about its population. In other words, these countries are easy to rate because they have tools and budgets to collect the necessary data for evaluation in this study.