Switzerland has been ranked the fourth richest country in the world, behind Norway, Ireland, and Luxembourg, with the Czech Republic taking nineteenth place.
The study, done by HelloSafe, creating a new prosperity index by combining five forms of assesment criteria: gross domestic product, gross national income per capita, human development, coefficient for income and wealth inequality, and relative poverty rate. They chose this variety of factors because they believe economic output is an easily manipulated metric. As the study explains, Ireland, for example, with “a GDP per capita of $150,865 in purchasing power parity, the country ranks among the most “productive” economies on earth according to the IMF. In reality, a large share of that figure belongs to Apple, Google and Pfizer, not to Irish households. The gap between apparent output and the actual income of residents exceeds $70,000 per person.”
With this index, the countries are assigned a number out of 100 and ranked.
- Norway (77.65)
- Ireland (75.06)
- Luxembourg (74.39)
- Switzerland (72.46)
- Iceland (72.23)
- Singapore (66.43)
- Denmark (65.78)
- Netherlands (58.17)
- Belgium (54.83)
- Sweden (54.62)
- Qatar (50.60)
- Germany (50.41)
- United Arab Emirates (50.22)
- Finland (49.13)
- Australia (46.24)
- Austria (43.46)
- United States (43.39)
- Canada (39.44)
- Czech Republic (38.49)
- France (38.12)
The Czech Republic was noted as having the lowest income inequality score of all countries on the Eurostat dataset used by the study, and ranks thirteenth most prosperous in Europe.
By creating a more nuanced index, HelloSafe hopes to “prove that being the richest country in the world “is not just about income or GDP, but about how wealth translates into quality of life, social cohesion and long-term development.”