“United States News” ranks 80 countries on how they are seen across the globe. These perceptions are used to identify which countries are the “best”.
Nine key characteristics reflecting each country’s quality of life and its potential to drive trade and investment are focused on.
The nine characteristics are:
Entrepreneurship and being “Open for Business.” These two characteristics look at the economy, the extent to which the economy is globally connected, innovation, how skilled the labour force is as well as the legal and governance frameworks.
Adventure: This measures how friendly and fun a country is.
Citizenship: This delves into human and property rights, income equality and the level of freedom citizens enjoy.
Cultural and Heritage: These two characteristics assess the richness of culture and how accessible these cultural riches are.
Mover: This category looks at how unique a country is and how much influence is potentially wields elsewhere.
Power: This category gauges a country’s international influence, alliances and military strength.
Quality of life: looks at the job market, economic stability, safety, income equality, political certainty, education and health.
By this standard Switzerland is the best country to live in. Iran and Iraq are shown to be the worst of the 80. Clearly many countries that are not ranked may be seen as better as or worse than this group of 80.
The United States of America is ranked as eight best. South Africa falls into the middle of the grouping being ranked 37 out of 80. This makes South Africa the best in Africa with the next best being Egypt (ranked 40) and Morocco (42).
All of South Africa’s peers in the BRICS grouping are ‘better’ than South Africa with China (ranked 16), Russia (24), India (27) and Brazil (28).
South Africa fares moderately well on most of the nine characteristics. However it received higher rankings for its people and natural environment than it does for its economy and politics. Its best sub-ranking is in the “movers” category as the country is seen as being unique and (to a lesser extent) dynamic. These characteristics make SA the 10th biggest ‘mover’.
Dragging SA’s ranking down is its poor performance in terms of being ‘open for business’ and ‘quality of life’. In these aspect South Africa ranks 65th and 66th respectively.
Central to the low ranking is the impact of ‘safety’, the poor public health and education systems, income equality and political instability.
The only two indicators that raise the country’s “Quality of Life” rating are affordability relative to other countries, and it being family friendly.
The graphic below shows which countries are ‘better’ than South Africa, which are worse and which are not ranked by US News.
