Measured Thoughts
Methodolgy
How the 2026 Best Countries Were Ranked
Behind a country’s wealth and success are the policies that create possibilities, the people that drive the effort, and the history that shapes the nation’s environment and perspectives.
Globalization has expanded a country’s presence beyond its physical borders, and the Best Countries report – now in its tenth year – seeks to examine a nation’s worth beyond hard metrics.
The rankings project is based on how global perceptions define countries in terms of a number of qualitative characteristics – impressions that have the potential to drive trade, travel and investment, and can directly affect national economies. The 2025 analysis covers perceptions of 85 nations.
The study and model used to score and rank countries were developed by global marketing and communications services company WPP and its proprietary BAV brand analytics tool and by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, specifically Professor David Reibstein.
A set of 73 country attributes – terms that can be used to describe a country that are also relevant to the success of a modern nation – were identified. Various attributes and nations were presented in a survey of 15,131 people from across the globe from December 15, 2025 to late February 24, 2026. Participants assessed whether they associated an attribute with a nation.
Each country was scored on each of the 73 country attributes based on a collection of individual survey responses. The more a country was perceived to exemplify a certain characteristic in relation to the average, the higher that country’s attribute score, and vice versa. These scores were transformed into a scale that could be compared across the board.
Attributes were grouped into 10 thematic factors that rolled into the Best Countries rankings: Adventure, Agility, Cultural Influence, Entrepreneurship, Heritage, Movers, Open for Business, Power, Quality of Life, and Social Purpose. Factor scores for each country were determined by averaging the scores that country received in each of the attributes comprising that factor.
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To determine the weight each factor had in the overall Best Countries score, the factors were correlated to 2025 gross domestic product at purchasing power parity per capita – a measure of inclusive prosperity comparable across countries – as reported by the World Bank. The standardized correlations served as the weights for each of the factors.
The Movers factor represents a version of the BAV tool’s BrandAsset Valuator Model of Brand Building, a metric that is predictive of a country’s future growth in terms of gross domestic product at purchasing power parity. It was correlated to GDP-PPP for 2030, as projected by the International Monetary Fund.
The country attribute scores were equally weighted within each factor. Factor weights differ slightly from previous years, as they are tied to more recent gross domestic product data. They may not add up precisely to 100 due to rounding.
To arrive at a country’s ranking, we first calculated its standardized scores for each of the above country attributes. Each country received 10 factor scores by averaging its standardized scores for the country attributes grouped into that factor. A country’s overall score reflects the weighted sum of its factor scores. The factor and overall scores were rescaled so that the top country in each subcategory received a value of 100, and others were calculated as a proportion of that top score. Countries were ranked in descending order of their scores.
A set of standard demographic questions helped to screen for global diversity and representation among participant groups. Numerous demographic data, such as, age, gender, employment status and type, and location-urban/suburban/rural were collected. The data can be sorted along any of these criteria.
Choosing Survey Participants
To understand how countries are perceived, we endeavored to survey engaged citizens who are broadly representative of the global population, with an emphasis on those who would deem the topic and findings most relevant to their lives.
Self-identification in demographic questions distinguished respondents into two defined groups: business decision-makers, meaning senior leaders in an organization or small-business owners who employ others; and, general public, meaning adults at least 18 years old who were nationally representative of their country in terms of age and gender.
Individuals who were likely to fit these descriptions were targeted and sent the link to an online survey powered by the Kantar Profiles Audience Network. A total of 15,131 individuals from 33 countries in regions spanning the globe – the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East – were surveyed. Of the respondents, 2,926 were business decision-makers and 12,205 were considered general public. Regardless of demographics or participant type, each individual’s responses weighed equally in the results.
Data Source: About the Survey
Survey participants were given a random subset of countries and country attributes to consider. The combinations were presented in a grid form where participants were prompted to associate countries with various characteristics. If a participant indicated they had not heard of a country, it was removed from their survey. Each participant considered about half of the country attributes for roughly a third of the countries. The more times an attribute-country pair was checked off, the higher the attribute score was for that country.
In addition to considering countries in terms of attributes, each survey participant was asked to respond to a set of questions gauging perceptions of the state of the world today on a variety of topics, including world events, the economy, the environment, technology, leadership and social issues.
Choosing the Countries to Rank
We narrowed the world’s nations down to a statistically manageable group by comparing the performance of countries in a number of key business, economic and quality-of-life indicators.
The 85 countries in the 2025 Best Countries rankings had to meet four benchmark criteria to be included in the study, or be a top 10 country in any of those benchmarks:
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Top 100 countries in terms of gross domestic product in any year from 2020 to 2024, based on World Bank data.
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Top 100 countries in terms of foreign direct investment inflows in any year from 2020 to 2024, based on World Bank data.
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Top 100 countries in terms of international tourism receipts or tourism arrivals in any year from 2020 to 2024, based on World Bank data.
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Top 150 countries in the U.N.’s Human Development Index in any year from 2020 to 2024.
Countries that did not reach all four of these benchmarks, were not otherwise in the top 10 for a single benchmark or did not report these statistics were not included.
Malta is making its first appearance in the Best Countries rankings in 2026. Five countries were dropped from the previous list: El Salvador, Honduras, Myanmar, Qatar, and Zimbabwe.
Collectively, the 85 countries in the report account for about 93.2% of global gross domestic product and represent nearly 78.4% of the world’s population. They span the globe, representing Africa, Asia, Central America, Eurasia, Europe, the Middle East, North America, Oceania and South America.
Best Countries first launched in 2016 based on a model of a country’s brand evaluation created by former BAV teams at WPP together with University of Pennsylvania professor David Reibstein.
Methodology FAQ
What’s different about this year’s Best Countries report?
The Best Countries rankings are based largely on perception, and countries received their overall score and rank based on the same set of attributes as previous years. However, the benchmarks used to determine the set of countries that are assessed each year are driven by hard data. Incorporating newly available data for these benchmarks – gross domestic product, foreign direct investment inflows, international tourism receipts or tourism arrivals, and the U.N.’s Human Development Index – can change the set of countries that are included in the analysis annually. Two years ago, a stipulation was added that if a country landed in the top 10 for any of the four benchmarks, regardless of whether it met the remaining criteria, it would be included in the rankings.
Some of the country attributes reflect more unfavorable aspects of a country. Could high scores on these attributes help raise a country’s score or rank?
Scores for the negative country attributes – bureaucratic and corrupt – were inverted when calculated into factor and overall scores. In this way, the countries that were the most closely associated with these attributes performed worse.
Were there ties?
No, scores were calculated in relation to each other in a way that did not allow for ties.
Could survey participants answer about their country of residence or citizenship?
Yes. Survey participants could answer about any country that was randomly assigned to them as long as they indicated they were familiar with that country.