Home / Business and Politics / Europe Offers the Most Business Opportunities: Denmark Ranks First, While Croatia is 46th

Europe Offers the Most Business Opportunities: Denmark Ranks First, While Croatia is 46th

Europe, despite the economic crisis and estimates from economic experts that it is slowly losing ground, offers the most business opportunities and has the best-regulated market. This is at least what the results of the research published by the business magazine Forbes at the end of each year claim.

This Forbes research covered 144 countries and measured 11 factors to arrive at optimal results (property rights, innovation, tax system, technology, corruption, monetary, individual and trade freedom, bureaucracy, investor protection, and stock market status), with equal importance assigned to each in calculating the final results.

Denmark has taken, as it did last year, the first place on this prestigious list, and of the top 25 countries, two-thirds are from the ‘Old Continent’. Croatia, on the other hand, ranked 46th. Things are not bright for the United States, which now finds itself in a poor 22nd place. However, what is particularly concerning is the constant decline that this superpower is experiencing. In 2009, it was in second place in the world, and since then, its rating has been falling every year. The United States is the largest economic market in the world, but its stumbling blocks are bureaucracy, low monetary freedom, and weak investor protection.

The winner, Denmark, has secured a place in the top 20 in all categories except one (bureaucracy), achieving particularly good results in the categories of personal and monetary freedom, and it also has an extremely low level of corruption. However, the economy of that country, valued at three hundred and forty million dollars, is experiencing very slow growth, primarily due to a decline in exports.

Among the top five on the Forbes list are New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. The United Kingdom is in ninth place, Germany in eighteenth, and Japan in twenty-third. The second-largest economic power in the world, China, is in 93rd place with catastrophic results achieved in measuring personal and monetary freedoms, the effectiveness of the bureaucratic system, and investor protection.