WHAT country's non-native English-speakers speak the best business English in the world? Try to think of five countries before reading on.

Done? The answer, according to GlobalEnglish, is probably not what you think. (GlobalEnglish is owned by Pearson, which part-owns The Economist).

Remember that the survey tested non-native speakers, so don't be too distracted by the placement of the Anglophone countries. Still, Global English's results are very strange. If you thought that the Philippines has the best business English in the world, and that Germany would miss the top 25, you haven't had the same work and travel experiences I have. Global English says this about its Business English Index:

The GOE [Globalisation of English] and BEI [Business English Index] together give us a complete picture of the trends, achievements and challenges in business communication and the importance of Business English in the workplace.

If this is a complete picture, we have a genuine stop-the-presses moment here: Madagascar, Bulgaria and Romania well ahead of Denmark, Switzerland and Germany? Spain just behind Angola? If this doesn't violate your common sense about the relative quality of English around the world, look at a few neighboring and demographically similar countries. Slovenia miles ahead of Slovakia and the Czech Republic? Argentina and Uruguay leagues ahead of Chile?

In mild amazement, I wrote to Global English's press-relations person, asking how the study had been compiled. His reply:

The Business English Index is based on the placement test that GlobalEnglish subscribers take within GlobalEnglish Edge, an on-demand Business English development solution, to assess the Business English proficiency level of each respondent. GlobalEnglish later analyzes the data based on respondents’ demographics, location and employer information to produce the annual report.

So what we're looking at is not "speakers of business English", but paying GlobalEnglish subscribers.

Statistics 101 should have taught the compilers of this study to frame these results very carefully. The idea that GlobalEnglish subscribers are representative of business-English speakers generally is perhaps completely backward: companies that subscribe to GlobalEnglish presumably feel the need to invest a lot of money to improve their business English. GlobalEnglish may well do that job superbly. But the obvious corollary is that many companies will not sign up for GlobalEnglish's services because their employees already speak good English. And those companies tend to be in the rich countries of northern Europe, which is why another study of English proficiency by EF, another language-teaching company, found a more predictable top 5: Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland and Norway, with another clutch of wealthier European and Asian countries making up the next tier. EF's index isn't perfect either, since, as EF notes, "the test-taking population represented in this index is self-selected and not guaranteed to be representative of the country as a whole." But at least EF included this straightforward caution. The GlobalEnglish paper includes no methodological note.

I missed the release of the GlobalEnglish rankings last year, but a few journalists didn't, uncritically swallowing the Philippines' number-one ranking then. Here's Yahoo News:

Well, people will now have to think twice before mocking Pinoys' use of the English language. The Philippines was named the world's best country in business English proficiency, even beating the United States, according to a recent study by GlobalEnglish Corporation. GlobalEnglish has released early this month the results of its annual Business English Index (BEI), the only index that measures business English proficiency in the workplace.

You won't catch me mocking Pinoys' use of the English language, but that's because that's a stupid and spiteful thing to do. I doubt very much that they have the best business English on earth. Getting and analysing good data on language proficiency is time-consuming and expensive, but if you're going to do it, it's worth doing right.