Italy Global Ranking 2013

There are many organizations in the world whose mission is to observe and evaluate countries, cities, companies, associations, and public and private institutions with respect certain parameters. Not all are equally reliable or completely impartial and not all of the criteria used to carry out such assessments are always acceptable and generals, however some organizations, criteria and indicators have gained a good reputation and can be considered good benchmarks to verify the actual quality of own performance compared to others.

One category of indicators is related to the various nations of the world and allows us to understand in broad terms how a nation is positioned with respect to best-of-breeds in a particular area. Some of these indicators are quite famous and are often cited by the press. For example, the Human Development Index or the Corruption Perceptions Index.

Notwithstanding that

1. just an index is not always sufficient to understand a problem of a certain complexity,
2. the value determined from a specific organization represents anyway a specific point of view, and that
3. it is not always possible to define an homogeneous set of evaluation parameters valid for any country,

to verify where our country is with respect others in this genre of rankings is still useful to understand whether there is room for improvement and growth in various sectors of the society which we live in.

Therefore I carried out a search regarding Italy going to check the latest position acquired with respect 30 different political, economic, and social indexes. Most of the values relate to the last three years, that is, from 2011 to 2013, some relate to the 2008-2010 period while one is about 2002 and I am not aware if there is a newer version.

Is not the purpose of this article to explain each indicator, so I limited myself to state the source and the year of assessment. Searching the web for indicator or source, you can find all the information you need about both what each index means, and how it was calculated and/or measured.

Putting together these data, I obtained a picture that is not overly exciting, at least for what concerns Italy. All the indicators see the best at the top. Italy is among the top 10 rankings in only six out of 30, and between the tenth and the thirtieth place only in the other 9. For all other indicators is lower than the thirtieth position. However, this would not be so bad if it were not for the rather low position that Italy has on some key indicators, such as that relating to the degree of corruption in the country, tax evasion, ease of access to credit, and equality between men and women.

Hereinafter are the thirty indicators divided into three blocks of 10. The values indicate the position, and then in each graph the smaller is the solid bar, the better is the position. The color of the solid bar indicates the year of assessment: the darker is, the more recent is the evaluation.

First block

Second block

Third block