Sweden Again Tops 2016 Global Green Economy Index

September 20th, 2016 by Joshua S Hill

Sweden has again topped Dual Citizen’s Global Green Economy Index, the fifth such analysis of how 80 countries are performing in the global green economy.

International consulting agency Dual Citizen has published its Global Green Economy Index (GGEI) since 2010, providing “a data-driven analysis of how 80 countries perform in the global green economy, as well as how expert practitioners rank this performance.” The Index provides an in-depth look at which countries are making progress toward a green economy, and which ones are lagging behind. In a year when countries are under increasing scrutiny to ratify the UN’s Paris Climate Agreement, this fifth edition of the Index sheds light on the top performers and the laggards of the current global green economy.

The GGEI provides a secondary resource on top of its Performance Index, in its Perception Survey — the way in which a country is perceived to be moving towards a green economy. The perception survey was conducted by Dual Citizen to a targeted set of respondents.

The overall ranking for both is as follows:

Sweden again took top spot in performance, and did so at an even greater score than it did last time, and similarly kept its perception rank in the top five. “It remains challenging to find a weak spot in Sweden’s results,” the authors of the GGEI wrote, “although being a relative measurement Sweden’s top score on the GGEI does not mean there is no room for further improvement.” Specifically, Dual Citizen points to the country’s Market & Investments dimension as containing some room for improvement, as its score for cleantech innovation is not yet on par with other leaders in the field such as the United States, Japan, and South Korea.

Sweden was joined at the top by other Nordic countries, including Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, each of which can similarly find room to grow in their cleantech innovation, as well as green branding and carbon efficiency.

The United States failed to enter the top 10 performance ranking (it ranked 30th, with a score of 51.53), despite having the second-highest perception ranking. Denmark, on the other hand, ranked second in perceived performance, but did relatively well by coming in 9th with actual performance. This can partly be attributed to the country’s early adoption of green economic growth, though its ranking has declined somewhat since 2014 (when it was ranked 5th with a score of 63.2) to now sit at 9th with a score of 61.84, due mostly to a significantly lower result in its Leadership & Climate Change dimension.

Developing countries such as Ethiopia (14th), Zambia (8th), Brazil (10th), and Costa Rica (11th) performed well in this most recent GGEI, all ranking in the top fifteen performance rankings. Sadly, there are no Asian countries ranking well in performance, with the exception of Cambodia, which is the most improved country compared to the last edition, rising 22 spots to sit at 20th overall. Conversely, while China (64th), India (68th), Indonesia (75th), Japan (34th), and South Korea (46th) all do well on the perception side of things, their actual performance lags behind.

For more information on Dual Citizen’s methodology, and the data sets behind its results, click here. The full report is available here (PDF).











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