Which countries have the best reputations? What does that even mean? Reputation Institute, a global private consulting firm based in Boston and Copenhagen, has just released its sixth annual “Country RepTrak” of what it calls “The World’s Most Reputable Countries,” a tool the firm uses to help it advise countries on how to bolster their reputations around the globe. It also counsels companies that want to know how their country of origin influences their reputation overseas, and companies interested in doing businesses abroad.
The list ranks the 55 countries with the highest GDPs. In the No. 1 slot this year: Canada, which has been the winner four out of six times. The other two years, in 2014 and 2010, it was No. 2. This year Norway moved up to second place from sixth in 2014 and Sweden is third, as it was last year. The Scandinavian countries and Finland have ranked in the top 10 all six years, as have Switzerland, Australia and the Netherlands. The U.S. is down in 22nd place, behind Thailand and just above Poland (more on the U.S. below).
To compile its data, RI ran online surveys of 48,000 consumers in G8 countries from February through April of this year. To flesh out the data, it interviewed 30,000 additional people in the 12 non-G8 countries with the biggest economies, including China, India and Brazil.
To compile its rankings, it asked three broad questions about countries’ overall reputations: Did the respondents have a “good feeling” about the countries, did they admire or respect the countries, did they trust the countries and did they think the countries had a “good overall reputation?” The rankings are based on those questions alone.
To get more insight into why respondents answered the way they did, RI asked about 17 different attributes, including physical beauty, whether the countries offer an array of appealing experiences like food, sports and entertainment and whether they produce high-quality products and services.
It also asked about “high transparency and low corruption.” The Nordic countries dominate the top of that list, with Norway in first place, Sweden in second place, Finland in third and Denmark in fifth. Canada is No. 4. Not surprisingly, Iran is at the bottom, followed by Pakistan, Russia and Nigeria. Like last year, the U.S. scored strikingly low, in 23rd place. I’m guessing that the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that opened the door to mega-rich super PACs, and predictions that the 2016 presidential race could wind up costing a staggering $5 billion, have added to the sense that the U.S. political system is not clean. Also the 2013 revelations by former CIA employee Edward Snowden about widespread secret U.S. government global surveillance programs are still in people’s minds.
Finally RI asked seven more questions, to get yet more information on what drove the broad rankings: Would you buy products from the country, would you invest there, visit there, live or work there, study or organize an event there? “What we’re trying to do is identify the correlation between the overall connection to the country and what we call supportive behavior,” says RI’s head of research Brad Hecht. “Will you visit, invest, work, buy or live and study in a country?”
What’s so great about Canada? “It’s consistently seen as a great place to live and it wasn’t affected significantly by the recession,” he says. “It’s also perceived as a good place for tourism.” Visitors can have a European-style experience in Quebec and in the winter months, find spectacular skiing across the country, from Mont-Tremblant in the East to Banff in central Canada to Whistler in the West. Toronto is hosting the Pan American games this month. The conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is perceived as stable, and the climate for business, healthy.
Though the U.S. has not declined in its ranking and is actually up 9.6 points since RI started the Country RepTrak six years ago, its performance still lags behind most of Europe, despite that continent’s economic problems. Hecht believes the U.S. struggles with its role as the world’s sole superpower, so that mistakes like the largely failed military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and the inability of the U.S. to play an effective role in other Middle East countries like Syria, where President Obama has made threats and then failed to follow through on them, has damaged the U.S.’s reputation globally. “There’s a perception that the U.S. is looking out for its own self-interest and not for anything else,” says Hecht. That said, the U.S. scores well when respondents are asked about brands and companies they see as strong. Google, Walt Disney, Microsoft and Apple all get high marks.
The U.S. also ranks third behind Japan and Germany as the most technologically advanced. But on global culture, despite the spread of U.S. music, films and other pop culture around the world, the U.S. comes in at ninth place. Consumers prefer Italy, which takes the No. 1 spot. Hecht says people like Italy’s combination of appealing lifestyle and high-quality luxury brands like Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Ferrari. France comes in at No. 2 on the culture ranking.
One area where the U.S. scores quite poorly: safety. Widespread gun ownership and gun violence have pushed the U.S. to 26th place. Mass incarceration is another negative. One statistic: the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s known prison population, with 2.2 million in prisons or jails, according to the Sentencing Project. “The perception is that it is getting worse, not better,” says Hecht.
The U.S. also ranks 19th on the question of whether it’s a beautiful country, despite Yosemite, the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains. “The U.S. has never been known as a place to visit because of its natural beauty,” says Hecht. Canada, Australia, Norway, Switzerland and New Zealand rank at the top of that list.
In sum, a country’s reputation rankings are extremely important, says Hecht, because all countries are competing for support from groups like tourists looking to spend leisure dollars, private businesses deciding where to invest, consumers buying foreign products and governments looking to place aid and investment funds.
See our slideshow above for the top 10 countries accord to Reputation Institute’s World’s Most Reputable Countries ranking and the list below for all 55 countries.
