Global Attractiveness Index

Preview of the 2026 GAI Results

At the midpoint of the 2026 edition of the GAI, the first findings highlight key priorities for strengthening Italy's attractiveness and its capacity to generate future growth. The analysis focuses on two strategic drivers of national competitiveness:

1. the contribution of multinational companies to Research and Development (R&D) and productivity
2. the role of highly qualified human capital, universities, and skills as enabling factors for national attractiveness.

The first key finding concerns Italy's structural underinvestment in Research and Development. In 2024, national R&D expenditure amounted to 1.38% of GDP, compared with the EU-27 average of 2.13%; corporate R&D spending reached only 0.79% of GDP, against the European average of 1.49%. Private companies finance 57.1% of total R&D investment and employ 54.5% of Italy's researchers and R&D personnel, confirming their role as the country's primary driver of innovation.

Within this context, multinational companies play a decisive role. Although they account for only 0.4% of Italian firms, they generate 21.0% of total turnover, 17.5% of value added, and 38.3% of national R&D expenditure, equivalent to €6.5 billion. They also invest €3,600 in R&D per employee, compared with €600 for domestic firms (5.7 times higher), achieve productivity of €107,000 in value added per employee (2.5 times higher), and pay average salaries of €42,200 (1.9 times higher).

Despite this contribution, in 2023 multinational companies accounted for only 9.8% of total employment in Italy, placing the country third from last among the EU-27. According to GAI estimates, aligning Italy with the European average would generate a potential GDP impact of €161 billion (+7.1%), with estimates ranging from €121 billion (+5.3%) to €201 billion (+8.8%). Attracting and retaining multinational companies therefore represents a strategic lever for fostering growth, innovation, and competitiveness.

The second area of analysis focuses on highly qualified human capital. Although Italy benefits from a widespread university system, attractive cities, and internationally recognised expertise, it continues to lag behind in tertiary education attainment. In 2024, only 31.6% of people aged 25–34 held a university degree, compared with the EU average of 45.4%, placing Italy second from last in the European Union. In the same year, 49,562 Italian graduates emigrated abroad—more than twice the number recorded in 2014—representing an estimated public investment in education of €6.9 billion.

To strengthen the attractiveness of Italy's university system and human capital, the main priorities identified include simplifying administrative procedures, expanding English-language degree programmes, increasing the availability of services and accommodation for international students, strengthening collaboration between universities and businesses, and promoting STEM and professionally oriented educational pathways.

The picture emerging from the first release of the 2026 Global Attractiveness Index confirms that attractiveness, innovation, productivity, and human capital are closely interconnected dimensions. Strengthening the presence of multinational companies, increasing investment in R&D, and retaining highly qualified talent means acting on some of the country's most important levers for supporting long-term economic growth.

Which are the most and least attractive countries in the 2025 GAI?

The Global Attractiveness Index 2025 ranks the United States in first place, with a score of 100, followed by China (87.7) and Germany (81.4).

It is worth noting that the economic data is updated with a few months' delay: the GAI snapshot is from early 2025. In such a changing environment, with such high risk factors, the United States' lead, which has been solid for more than five years, is (perhaps) not necessarily a foregone conclusion. 

The Chinese macroeconomic picture is also showing signs of slowing down, and growth, which until a few years ago seemed unstoppable, is now more subdued. Germany, despite being in third place, is a country with a declining GAI score (91.0 in 2023; 85.4 in 2024; 81.4 this year) as a result of industrial stagnation and a slowdown in domestic demand and exports.

The Italian outlook

Italy gains three positions, moving from 19th to 16th place, overtaking Denmark, Belgium and Ireland. 

The Index highlights two external factors that need to be monitored closely, as they could threaten Italy's attractiveness: the emergence of new hostile tariff regimes linked to developments in US trade policy and any countermeasures adopted at global level, and the instability of international energy markets, exacerbated by tensions in the Middle East, with potential repercussions on prices and energy security in Italy.

There are also three internal factors that can be addressed to increase the country's attractiveness:

• updating the education system to reduce the skills mismatch
• promoting talent and attracting and retaining skilled workers
• making bureaucracy and regulation more effective.

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.

The GAI's KPIs are subdivided into four sub-indices: a Positioning Index (PI), a Dynamicity Index (DI), a Sustainability Index (SI), and a Future Orientation Index. On the other hand, the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict Exposure Index, a short-term index introduced in the 2022 and 2023 editions, has been discontinued: two years after the outbreak of the conflict, it is less effective and relevant, precisely in light of the realignment of trade routes to and from the countries involved.

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

• Ferruccio De Bortoli (Columnist, Il Corriere della Sera)
• Lorenzo Bini Smaghi (Economist; former Member of the Executive Committee, European Central Bank)
• Enrico Giovannini (Scientific Director, ASviS; former Italian Minister of Infrastrucutre and Sustainable Mobility)
  
• Roberto Monducci (former Director of the Department of Statistics, ISTAT)

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