Which countries rank highest for business formation, expansion, and growth? GEDI’s 2014 top ten

The results of the 2014 GEDIndex are in. The US tops the rankings with a score of 82.5, five points above second ranked Australia.  Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland round out the top five, and Taiwan and Singapore rank 6^th and 10^th—the only non-western nations in the top 10.

The overall composition of the top ten has changed little from last year, (Anglo-Saxon, Nordic, and Western European countries in the innovation-driven stage of development are in the front ranks). However, there are several noteworthy results in this year’s Index.

Denmark has declined markedly from its high of 84.6 in 2008 (the highest GEDI score ever observed) down to 72.5 this year, a decline of fourteen percent in less than half a decade. This is the sharpest decline observed for any top ten ranked nation. The Netherlands declined from 73.1 in the 2013 edition to 69.0 in the 2014 edition—almost six percent in a single year—due to a sharp decreases in the High Growth and Tech Sector pillars.

Singapore and Taiwan achieve top ten performance among an otherwise homogenous group, driven by a combination of institutional conditions and individual aspirations. They score particularly well in economic freedom and the percentage of new businesses with high job expectations (over 10 additional employees and 50% growth in five years). These two countries also score well in the Entrepreneurial Aspirations subindex as a whole.

The GEDIndex measures 120 countries along 30 dimensions of entrepreneurship—15 institutional components and 15 individual components—to provide a comprehensive picture of the entrepreneurial attitudes, abilities, and aspirations that make up the entrepreneurship ecosystem. We use datasets from globally recognized organizations and 17 years of in-house expertise on the science of measuring entrepreneurship to produce the GEDIndex yearly.