Look Ma, We're Number One!

The Economist Intelligence Unit just released the business environment ranking for around 80 countries. This is a comprehensive study that takes into account over 90 indicators for each country, around half of them are purely quantitative (i.e. GDP, inflation,etc), while the rest are more relative indicators like the possibility of an armed conflict. The outcome of the study is that each country is assigned a number (on a scale of 1 to 10) for its performance over 2004-08 and forecasted another number for 2009-13.

The amazing thing is that Egypt sits comfortably on top of the list! I knew that Egypt's economy has been steaming on for the last few years, but it's great to see that this is forecasted to continue during the the upcoming 5 years. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Egypt's progress from its current ranking to the its forecasted ranking in 2013 is much bigger than other developing giants such as China or India!

That said, there are two interesting points in the report:

1. For 2009-13, the indicator for the risk of armed conflict for Middle East & Africa is 3.4. That makes sense, we have a very turbulent area. For Latin America it's 4.0, again, makes sense, they have Chavez. But for Western Europe, it's 4.7! Of course that's better than 3.4, but technically that implies that modern-day Western Europe (one of the the most politically stable areas of the world) has a 50-50 chance of an armed conflict in 2013! That is scary shit.

2. The US's ranking for 2004-08 was 8.4, that's extremely interesting. So, even though the US had a president who could barely speak English and a total economic meltdown, it was rated around 20% more than what Egypt is forecasted to achieve by the end of the next 5 years. An economic meltdown is easy to arrange, I know people. But do you think we could convince W. to go on the ballot for Egypt's 2011 presidential elections?