😏The 40 Best Countries in the World, As Determined by the People

Key Takeaways

• Switzerland is the best country in the world according to a global survey conducted in 2024
• Respondents ranked it highly for business (#2), quality of life (#3), social purpose (#7), and cultural influence (#8)

"Best" is a Public Perception

U.S. News designed its “Best Countries” ranking around 73 attributes grouped into 10 thematic subrankings, such as Quality of Life, Power, Entrepreneurship, etc.

The attributes reflect public perceptions, not hard data.

To gather this, the survey is distributed globally to about 17,000 respondents, including business leaders, informed elites, and general citizens.

Each participant is shown a random subset of countries (that must meet GDP, tourism, and FDI thresholds) and asked to rate how strongly they associate those countries with each of the 73 attributes.

Additional Survey Details

These individual attributes are pre-assigned to categories by researchers, and scores are normalized on a 0–100 scale. Category scores are then averaged for each country.

Finally, respondents also rank how important each category is to them. These rankings determine the weights assigned to each category.

A country’s final score is calculated by combining its weighted category scores, producing the overall rankings seen in this graphic.