New Global Capitalism Index (GCI) and rankings reveal remarkable insights across the world’s national and regional economies

The University of Virginia has published the Global Capitalism Index (GCI), a first-in-kind data set offering unprecedented insights into the globe’s capitalism conditions in every country. Assembled from more than two hundred data sets across eight key pillars, the GCI’s country-by-country scores offer an array of ways to understand capitalism around the world. In aggregate, the data – which was rigorously assembled by an interdisciplinary cohort of researchers led by the Karsh Institute of Democracy’s Democracy and Capitalism Lab and UVA Darden’s Institute for Business 

in Society, measures capitalism on a global basis, while addressing key questions about the relationship between capitalism and key economic outcomes such as well-being, corruption, democracy, and inequality.

The GCI’s first release demonstrates the dataset’s varied usefulness. Using data that begins in 2009, the index shows a global incremental reduction in capitalist conditions over the past 16 years of underlying data, which is from 2009-2025 and will be updated annually. Other broad conclusions across the full data set include regional divergences that are widening, among them improvement in Central Asia and declines in Latin America and Western Europe. Capital markets and banking are the weakest universal pillars across all countries, while property rights are the most differentiating feature. Case studies of key economies (China, Germany, India) paint nuanced pictures of notable recent country-level changes.

Key comments from lead author:

• “If you ask anyone what capitalism is, the answers are all different, and that makes it hard to argue about the validity or value of it,” said Scott Miller, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Darden; Director, Democracy and Capitalism Lab, Karsh Institute of Democracy, and lead author on the project. “We concluded that this word—capitalism—matters to everyone, so it matters to define it and measure how it really works across the globe.”
• “This is not just an academic project,” Miller said. “The GCI can have real-world implications for policymakers and business leaders in terms of understanding the upside and downside of decisions.”
• “For individual countries, the index makes it much easier to identify what conditions are conducive to capitalism and which are not,” Miller said. “Using China as an example, we can see in sharper relief the profile and shape of the underlying economy, including surprisingly strong business conditions but increasingly restricted flow of goods and capital.”

Under the index’s 1-100 ranking framework, the top-ranked country was Switzerland  and the bottom-ranked was Venezuela. However, views by sector and across multiple countries and regions provide a much more nuanced and actionable insights, including counterintuitive results and case studies. For example, Zimbabwe and Algeria represent two of the top-improving economies for capitalism. Of the countries where conditions declined most sharply since 2009, Sierra Leone (-23.9) and Venezuela (-23.2) had the biggest changes. Nordic countries occupy notable high rankings, even though they are also associated with high levels of social support.

Case Studies

The index’s first release is accompanied by 5 example case studies of individual countries, which include insightful details.

• China - A new business surge in 2019 tied to a foreign investment law
• Germany – Wealthy economy with a structurally weak banking score
• India – GDP growth conceals deepening capital account restrictions
• Lebanon - Banking stability tracks a financial system failure in real time
• The Gambia - Property rights and the fall of a dictator in 2017.

Variations of Capitalism

In addition to country-level insights, the index is also useful for understanding the several forms that capitalism is shown to take. Far from a monolithic economic model, the index shows that at the current time, capitalism shows up in one of four archetypes:

• Entrepreneurial – Typically strong in new business formation and market policies; weaker in property rights and free flow of goods and capital. The top three are Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the U.S.
• Corporate – Strong in capital markets and banking stability and growth, but notably weak in market competition, labor market freedom, market policy and business formation. Japan and South Korea are the most capitalist of the corporate cohort of countries.
• Institutional - Strong in the “real economy” (market competition, labor market, business formation) and significant weakness in the financial sector (banking and capital markets). Norway and Western Europe lead this cohort. 
• Commercial Capitalism - Defined by the primacy of free flow of goods and capital and property rights and private ownership. Everything else is negative. Notable outliers include Singapore and France.

Capitalism’s Relationship to Societal Pillars

In addition to global, country and archetype analysis, the GCI also serves as a key tool in addressing the key question of whether and how capitalist conditions and economies contribute to important societal outcomes, including inequality, well-being, democracy and corruption. To demonstrate this utility, the index’s creators applied the GCI’s inaugural data set to the following questions:

• Are capitalist societies more unequal and more corrupt?
• Do citizens of countries with capitalist systems report higher well-being and are those citizens happier?
• Can capitalist and democratic systems co-exist?
• Must capitalist economies feature low taxes?

About the GCI
The GCI is a novel quantitative model of capitalism comprised of 242 datasets across 33 domains, and 8 independent subindices, all of which are compiled and weighted via custom principal components analysis (PCA) for 161 countries over years 2009-2025. The methodology does not include subjective weights. The subindices are property rights, market policy, labor market openness, market competition, banking system strength, new business growth, and free flow of goods and capital.

Potential Users and Applications
The index’s combination of rigor and simplicity makes it an attractive tool for a range of potential users and applications, including scholars, internationally active businesses seeking to understand business conditions, economic and monetary policymakers, cross-border regulators designing rules, labor market participants comparing conditions between markets, and many more. 

About Karsh, Darden and UVA

The Karsh Institute of Democracy is a nonpartisan, pan-University institute at the University of Virginia that brings together scholars, students, and communities to strengthen democracy. The Darden School of Business, UVA’s graduate business school, prepares responsible leaders through transformational learning and advances knowledge that improves business and society. Darden’s Institute for Business in Society convenes business leaders, scholars and practitioners to advance ideas and practice at the intersection of ethics, strategy and decision-making. The University of Virgina is a public university founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819.

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