Page 104 - MYM 2016

Improving Economic Prosperity through Nation Branding
at the website of the best countries study (www.usnews.com/news/best-countries) you can nd more detailed information and additional “best of ” lists.
about how they are actually perceived globally. e goal of the Best Countries study is to provide nations with a data-driven model that demonstrates the direct and indirect impact of nation brands on econ- omies and o ers prescriptive measures for change.
You can nd details of our methods in a book co-authored with BAV’s CEO John Gerzema, Best Countries: De ning Success and Leadership in the Twenty-First Century. You can also access the full Best Countries study on the U.S. News website at www.usnews.com/news/best-countries.
Our criteria for the inclusion of the 60 nations in the Best Countries study were GDP, tourist arriv- als, foreign direct investment in ows, and human development. For the 60 top-scoring nations in these criteria, we surveyed more than 16,000 global participants (including business decision-makers and educated elites along with the general public), asking about 65 core brand attributes such as bureaucracy, strength of international alliances, education levels, economic stability, religious free- dom, gender equality, and richness of history, just for example.
We grouped the 65 attributes into 9 general sub-rankings that re ect how the nations were per- ceived in terms of (1) Adventure, (2) Citizenship, (3) Cultural In uence, (4) Entrepreneurship, (5) Heritage, (6) Movers (up-and-coming economies), (7) Open for Business, (8) Power, and (9) Quality of Life. To arrive at the nal country rankings, we applied statistical weighting based on the relative
correlation between the sub-rankings and the coun- tries’ per capita GDP (at purchasing power parity).
Top-ranked countries
We released the results at the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. e top- ranked countries were as follows:
top-ranked countries, 2016 World economic forum
1. Germany
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. United States
5. Sweden
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Sub-rankings of countries
e sub-rankings of nations in the Best Coun- tries study are also instructive. e following tables provide the rankings of the top ve nations in each of the nine sub-rankings, along with (1) the relative percentage correlation of the sub-ranking to GDP PPP per capita and (2) the survey attributes that formed the basis of the sub-ranking.
As you might expect, it is possible for a nation to be perceived as strong in one sub-ranking
and weak in another. Brazil might be viewed as strong in Adventure, but not necessarily strong in