2026年世界竞争力年鉴（英）
Every year I am asked the same question: what makes an economy competitive? And every year, the honest answer drifts a little further from the textbook one.
Costs matter. Scale matters. Talent, technology, infrastructure, and market access all matter. And yet, none of them explain why – in a world that is visibly fragmenting – capital, people, and trust keep gravitating toward the same handful of places. They aren’t always the cheapest, largest, or most technologically advanced of places, but they are places where people believe in the rules. All that may sound a little schoolmasterly.
But a major finding of the 2026 IMD World Competitiveness Ranking (WCR) is that many of the economies at the top of the table are not the most developed economies, nor the largest exporters, nor the biggest markets. So, what are they? Economies that uphold the rule of law most consistently.
Economic competitiveness in 2026 is no longer mainly a contest of cost or scale, or even of innovation. It is a contest of institutional credibility. The more fragmented the world becomes, the more valuable predictable rules, enforceable commitments, and legitimate state capacity become.
We live in a less rule-bound world than at any point since the Center began publishing its WCR 38 years ago. The war between Israel and Iran has crossed thresholds that were unimaginable two years ago. The genocide in Gaza has shattered any remaining pretence that civilian protection norms are universally applied. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues into its fifth year. And multiple armed conflicts across Africa – from the Sahel to Sudan to the eastern Congo – have displaced more people than at any point this century.
Elsewhere, Asia faces sharpening threats to international peace, from the Taiwan Strait to the Korean Peninsula and the South China Sea. Latin America has its own version of the same crisis, most starkly in the unlawful United States’ intervention against Venezuela, which has been carried out without the authorization of the Security Council and against the basic prohibition on the use of force in another sovereign state’s territory.
The rule of law, read economically, is the institutional condition under which private and public actors can make long-horizon decisions, because they expect rules to be applied predictably and fairly enough to make investment, innovation and cooperation worthwhile.
The distinction that matters the most is not between more rules versus fewer rules.
Rather, it’s between rules on paper versus rules people believe. Economies do not get competitive by legislating more. They get competitive when economic actors trust that contracts will be upheld, public decisions will be reviewable, corruption will be constrained, and administrative discretion will operate within visible limits. And this is why some economies with elaborate legal architectures underperform, while others with leaner statute books outperform. The practical question isn’t how many rules exist, but whether such rules are believable.
The global setting makes the argument more urgent. Trade tensions are rising. Policy uncertainty is elevated. FDI is weak. Public trust is thin. Resilience, strategic autonomy, and selective integration have replaced the older default of open integration. In 2025, 68% of economies went backwards on rule of law. Citizens, on average, trusted their courts more (54%) than their national governments (39%) or their parliaments (37%).
Two recent voices help as supporting architecture: Mark Carney’s and Alexander Stubb’s. Carney’s 2026 Davos argument – from financing the transition in 2022, to the “rewiring” of trade and energy in 2024, plus his blunt 2026 verdict that the world is in a “rupture, not a transition” – captures the realization that the old bargain is dead, and that a “world of fortresses” would be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.
Stubb – as conveyed in his 2025 and 2026 public speeches, and then as cemented in his 2026 book The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order – presents a similar framework: the post-Cold War order is over, and power is shifting. As such, he says, values-based realism is required.
The economy, security, and technology can no longer be treated as separate concepts, in Stubb’s words. As such, economies can remain competitive not by choosing between realism or values, nor by choosing between openness or security, but by embedding all four in institutions that are credible, enforceable, and trusted.
Strong long-term performers in the WCR seem to be rule-of-law abiders, but rule-breaking or selectively rule-using actors seem to be capable of achieving impressive, short-run gains through scale, coercive coordination, commodity rents or strategic arbitrage. The 2026 WCR surfaces this complexity.
As always, we are indebted to our Partner Institutes whose support makes our work possible.
