{"id":294942,"date":"2019-01-23T14:45:31","date_gmt":"2019-01-23T12:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=294942"},"modified":"2019-01-23T14:45:31","modified_gmt":"2019-01-23T12:45:31","slug":"why-south-africa-is-the-37th-best-country-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/lifestyle\/294942\/why-south-africa-is-the-37th-best-country-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Why South Africa is the 37th best country in the world"},"content":{"rendered":"

US News has published its latest Best Countries ranking for 2019<\/a><\/strong>, where South Africa has climbed two places – but against a familiar backdrop of corruption and safety concerns.<\/span><\/p>\n

The report covers 80 countries and ranks them on how global perceptions define them in terms of a number of qualitative characteristics, as well as impressions that have the potential to drive trade, travel and investment, and directly affect national economies.<\/p>\n

Each country is scored on 65 attributes spread across nine broad categories: Adventure, Citizenship, Cultural Influence, Entrepreneurship, Heritage, Movers, Open for Business, Power, and Quality of Life.<\/p>\n

Adventure<\/strong> looks at how friendly and fun a country is, while citizenship<\/strong> delves more into human rights, property rights, equality and freedom enjoyed by its people.<\/p>\n

Cultural influence<\/strong> assesses the richness of a country’s culture, and how it influences society, which ties into the heritage<\/strong> category, which measure the accessibility of these things.<\/p>\n

Entrepreneurship<\/strong> and open for business<\/strong> look at economic aspects – particularly how connected a country is to the rest of the world, innovation, skilled labour force, legal frameworks and various government roles in this.<\/p>\n

The mover<\/strong> category looks at how unique a country is and is classified as an ‘up and coming’ economy, while the power category gauges a country’s influence, alliances and military.<\/p>\n

The final broad category is quality of life<\/strong>, which looks at the job market, economic stability, safety, income equality, political certainty, education and health.<\/p>\n

\n

South Africa<\/strong><\/p>\n

South Africa was ranked 37th overall, up two placed from 39th in 2018.<\/p>\n

Across the nine categories it ranks somewhere near the middle in most metrics. It’s best placing is 10th in the movers category – where is forms part of a group of emerging global influencers.<\/p>\n

It performs poorly in the quality of life and open for business categories, where it ranks 66th and 65th, respectively.<\/p>\n

Here, South Africa loses big with an incredibly low safety rating (one of the lowest – the only African nation with a lower score is Nigeria), and equally as poor ratings in public health, income equality, political stability and education.<\/p>\n

The only two indicators that raise the country’s quality of life are affordability (relative to other countries), and it being family friendly, thanks to the numerous activities available.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

South Africa is dragged down down further due to its reputation for being corrupt. President Cyril Ramaphosa has waged war against state capture and corruption, since coming to power a year ago. “We\u2019ll succeed in this task. South Africa will soon be corruption free,” he has said.<\/p>\n

In the open for business category, high levels of corruption and extremely low levels of government transparency, exacerbate a fairly large bureaucratic process and middling manufacturing costs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Other areas of concern on South Africa’s report card include respect for property rights, which scored low; as well as poorly distributed political power. ‘<\/p>\n

You can view the full breakdown here.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Read:\u00a0The 11 biggest threats facing South Africa in 2019 according to CEOs<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US News has published its latest Best Countries ranking for 2019, where South Africa has climbed two places – but against a familiar backdrop of corruption and safety concerns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":102841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9876],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-294942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lifestyle","tag-headline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294942"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":294972,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294942\/revisions\/294972"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}