Entrepreneurial Countries 2024

Each year, CEOWORLD Magazine compiles a list of the most entrepreneurial countries. In order to do that, they score and rank countries on a variety of factors including innovation, competitiveness, access to capital, infrastructure, labor skills, and openness for business. Determining how hospitable a country will be to new businesses is a complicated process and starting a new business is never easy, but these six areas help indicate where in the world starting a new business will have the least resistance.

In 2021, the overall scores ranged from 12.18 (El Salvador) to 42.88 (United States). It's important to note that not all countries in the world are included in the Entrepreneurial Index. However, 95% of the world's economy is represented within the data, providing a reasonable look at the state of the world for entrepreneurs.

Besides the US, Germany is the only other country with a total score over 40 points, but the United Kingdom, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates all scored in the 30s. While all of these countries had generally lower scores in innovation and competitiveness, they also all had relatively high scores in both access to capital and infrastructure. In addition, labor skills were higher in most of the top five countries, and openness for business scores were low. Here, Israel was the outlier. While its total score placed it in the top five, it stood out from the other countries because it scored high in innovation, competitiveness, and access to capital but low in infrastructure and labor skills.

While El Salvador had the lowest score, there were a total of seventeen countries with scores below 13 on the index. Seven of them had scores under 12.5: El Salvador at 12.18, Pakistan at 12.24, Ethiopia at 12.27, Zambia at 12.27, Algeria at 12.28, Bolivia at 12.32, and Paraguay at 12.39. As you would expect, these countries scored lower on access to capital, infrastructure, and labor skills. What was interesting is that these countries generally were close to the median when it comes to innovation and competitiveness.