The Elite Quality Index

Here are the top ten, by Tomas Casas and Guido Cozzi:

1. Singapore

2. Switzerland

3. Germany

4. United Kingdom

5. United States

China comes in #12, Mexico wins for Latin America, Poland overperforms and France (!) underperforms.  Botswana is #23, and Argentina…uh-oh.  I don’t quite understand how the index is constructed, but how much a given elite focuses on Value Creation and avoids rent-seeking seems to be a key consideration.  The degree of Regulatory Capture counts as a negative.  Overall, the U.S. does very, very well on many metrics, but does poorly on Value Extraction.

Here is the underlying paper.  Here is the sponsoring organization.  Here is a lengthy treatment of the methodology.  For the pointer I thank Chandran.