Is Switzerland the best country in the world?

January 25, 2019, 3 Comments

The best country in the world is… Switzerland. Again. After being No1 for the last two years, the Swiss have made it a hat-trick and come top of an international survey rating the Best Countries in the world. But how did Switzerland do that? And where did it slip up?

Nine categories were used to determine the rankings for 80 countries, and then different ‘attributes’ rated to make up the category scores. Switzerland did really well in the Citizenship, Quality of Life, Open for Business and Entrepreneurship categories, which is pretty much as expected. It did less well in the Adventure, Heritage and Movers categories.

Looking further into the attributes within the rankings, we can see the good and bad (luckily no ugly) aspects of life in Switzerland. First the bad news. In these ten attributes Switzerland scored very poorly indeed:

• Sexy
• Fun
• Has great food
• Cheap production costs
• Strong military
• Affordable
• Politically influential
• Culturally significant in terms of entertainment
• Being different
• Influential culture

But there was good news too. Switzerland got top marks for these ten attributes:

• Trustworthy
• Cares about the environment
• Cares about human rights
• Modern
• Well-educated population
• No corruption
• Good public health and education systems
• Economically and politically stable
• Safe
• Scenic

Plus there were other 14 factors that were rated but not included in the final rankings. Here Switzerland was in the top two for Headquartering an Organisation, Green Living, Comfortable Retirement and Transparency.

Of course it’s not as simple as that. The survey has in-built weighting of the categories that skews the results, meaning that Adventure only accounts for 2% of the overall score whereas Open for Business is 11.08%. In fact over half of the final ranking is made up of just three categories: Citizenship, Quality of Life and Entrepreneurship. And Switzerland did well in all three so came out top of the list, despite not coming first in any one of the nine categories.

Not forgetting that it is a survey, based on the answers from 20,301 people in 36 countries around the world, and over half of them were ‘informed elites’. And it only covers 80 countries, so Belgium and Iraq were in there but Austria and Kenya were not.

No matter what the methodology, it came to the right conclusion. Switzerland is the best country in the world. For the landscape, the people, the air, the trains, and of course the completely divine chocolate.

Do you agree?