Luxembourg Third Worldwide In Growth Promise

Luxembourg ranks third worldwide on the index of growth promise indicators (GPIs), according to a report released by KPMG Global this month. Country-specific raw data on debt, trade, education, life expectancy, technology, government transparency, and many other categories were funnelled through a weighting system developed by expert analysts and translated into scores in five areas: macroeconomic stability; openness to catch-up; infrastructure; human capital; and institutional strength. The composite of these five resulted in a single GPI score, the highest being held by the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Fourteen of the top 20 countries are European, and eight of the top ten. Among the more notable changes in ranking compared to last year's survey are Hungry (43rd) and Costa Rica (46th), which each jumped six spots. In contrast, Macedonia (77th) fell eleven places, and South Africa (87th) twenty-two.

One of the more interesting of the five metrics is perhaps "openness." The study found openness trending downwards, with 97 countries becoming less open since 2012. This backswing follows a five-year period, 2002-07, during which 122 countries became more open. Neither statistic is too surprising, perhaps, given what happened between these two periods, i.e. the financial crisis. The trend seems to lend empirical support to what many have surmised, that the crisis begat scepticism in the marketplace which begat a slowdown in globalisation, reflected popularly in the likes of Trump and Brexit.

In the report, Luxembourg earns a trend-bucking 10 out of 10 in openness, compared to, for example, the United States' lacklustre 0.65. The Grand...