This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: 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 began 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.
"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.
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. 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 Angola.
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.
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