US News has published its latest Best Countries ranking for 2019, where Nigeria has climbed two places.
The report covers 80 countries and ranks them on how global perceptions define them in terms of a number of qualitative characteristics, as well as impressions that have the potential to drive trade, travel and investment, and directly affect national economies.
Each country is scored on 65 attributes spread across nine broad categories: Adventure, Citizenship, Cultural Influence, Entrepreneurship, Heritage, Movers, Open for Business, Power, and Quality of Life.
Adventure looks at how friendly and fun a country is, while citizenship delves more into human rights, property rights, equality and freedom enjoyed by its people.
Cultural influence assesses the richness of a country’s culture, and how it influences society, which ties into the heritage category, which measure the accessibility of these things.
Entrepreneurship and open for business look at economic aspects – particularly how connected a country is to the rest of the world, innovation, skilled labour force, legal frameworks and various government roles in this.
The mover category looks at how unique a country is and is classified as an ‘up and coming’ economy, while the power category gauges a country’s influence, alliances and military.
The final broad category is quality of life, which looks at the job market, economic stability, safety, income equality, political certainty, education and health.
Nigeria
Nigeria was ranked 74th overall, up two placed from 76th in 2018.
Across the nine categories it ranks somewhere near the middle in most metrics. It’s best placing is 46th in the Power category – with a strong military influence.
It performs poorly in the Citizenship, Adventure, Quality of life and heritage categories, where it ranks 74th, 77th, 74th and 76th respectively.
Here, Nigeria loses big with an incredibly low safety rating (the lowest in Africa), and equally as poor ratings in economically stable, income equality, political stability, health instability and education.
The only two indicators that raise the country’s quality of life are affordability, income equality and it being family friendly.
In the open for business category, extremely high levels of corruption and extremely low levels of government transparency, is also an attribute of Nigeria.
Other areas of concern on Nigeria’s report card include educated population, which scored low; as well as infrastructure.’
