Global Attractiveness Index

The Global Attractiveness Index research project was launched in 2016 to make available to Italian and international decision-makers an innovative country index that can offer a representative profile of the attractiveness and competitive sustainability of countries and, as a result, provide dependable information to aid in making system-wide choices about growth and optimization of the pro-business environment.

The GAI measures the attractiveness of a country using a range of primarily quantitative indicators that represent the various aspects of a country’s attractiveness, dynamism and sustainability. Specifically, the GAI analyzes attractiveness from a dual perspective:

• internal—the ability to retain resources already present in the area;
• external—the ability to attract new resources from the outside.



How does the GAI guarantees data comparison over the years?

A distinctive feature of the Global Attractiveness Index is that it reconstructs its series from past data to reflect in each year’s report the updates issued by the leading international statistical bodies from which the databases are derived.

In fact, for correct comparison of the Index over time, the time series on which the indicator is built must be technically comparable and gathered using the same criteria. In some cases, the same piece of data obtained years later may be subject to re-evaluation, both because of changes in the methodology of data collection, as well as differences between an initial estimated value and the final value. 

For this reason, every year we reconstruct the index's rankings of the Global Attractiveness Index covering the last seven years. Back-calculation of the Index is an important methodological approach of the Global Attractiveness Index that, on the one hand, makes it possible to take account of the changes connected with updating the time series and, on the other, guarantees the comparison over time of the KPIs and the Positioning Index (PI) for each country, providing a more representative and transparent picture of the progress made by the various economies over time.

Who are the winners and losers in the 2022 GAI?

Out of 148 countries, only 7 have a high attractiveness (equal to 4.7% of the total), 9 have a medium-high attractiveness (6.1%), 47 have a medium-low attractiveness (31.8%), and the remaining 85 have a low attractiveness (57.4%).

Germany, the United States and Hong Kong are at the top of the 2022 GAI ranking, while Italy is at the 19th place, in the medium-low attractiveness range. Innovation is the macro-area in which Italy is best placed, while Efficiency is the area where it gets the worst result, due to the growth of the unemployment rate (+0.2%) and the entry of 7 new countries in the Rule of Law Index, all of them having a more advanced rule of law than Italy.

At the same time, however, Italy is regaining attractiveness on international markets in terms of foreign investment, with a variation of +108 positions compared to the previous year. This leap comes mainly from the recovery after the collapse of foreign investments due to the pandemic in 2020: at that time, the country was among those at greatest risk both for the high intensity of infection and the fragility of the country’s economic system. Italy has also registered a robust growth in tourist flows: after reaching a value of -57,6% during the pandemic, it has grown back up to +41.2% in 2021.

Learn more about the results

The Scientific Committee of the Global Attractiveness Index project is comprised of:

• Ferruccio De Bortoli erruccio De Bortolie della Sera)
• Lorenzo Bini Smaghi (Economist; former Member of the Executive Committee, European Central Bank)
• Roberto Monducci (Counselor of the Italian Minister for Infrastructures and Sustainable Mobility, former Director of the Department of Statistics, ISTAT)

#ItalyisDifferent