The nations that generally rank in the bottom half of these WEF rankings are the ones that are typically considered as being "Third World," or poor.
However, the WEF applies a complicated formula (not fully explained), which weights each factor differently for different countries in order to produce their overall composite ranking for each country. As a result, the U.S. receives an overall ranking of #7, which is much higher than would have been the case if all of the individual component-rankings had been considered equally. Based upon the vague explanation that's provided, it seems that the factors on which the U.S. ranked the worst were treated as being relatively unimportant determinants of the overall rated economic performance of this country, when WEF came up with their (relatively meaningless) overall composite rankings.
Of the 117 different factors that were ranked, the U.S. scored among the top 7 on only 18 factors; and so, these 18 factors must have far outweighed, in their consideration, all of the other 99 factors combined. Here are these 18, the apparently overriding, factors, the ones that the WEF accentuated in order to have been able to grant the U.S. a #7 overall rank: GDP, Population, GDP as a Share of World GDP, Strength of Investor Protection, Available Airline Seat Kilometers, Malaria Incidence, Tuberculosis Incidence, Tertiary Education Enrollment Rate, Brain Drain (attractiveness to talented people), Redundancy Costs, Domestic Market Size, Foreign Market Size, Extent of Marketing, Capacity for Innovation, Quality of Scientific Research Institutions, Company Spending on R&D, University-Industry Collaboration in R&D, and finally, Availability of Scientists and Engineers.
By contrast, for examples: U.K. ranked among the top 7 on 20 factors but ranked only #8 overall; Denmark ranked among the top 7 on 22 factors but ranked only #12 overall; Canada ranked among the top 7 on 17 factors but ranked only #14 overall; and Norway ranked among the top 7 on 20 factors but ranked only #15 overall.
Here are the top-rated countries in WEF's overall composite rankings: Switzerland scored among the top 7 on 52 factors and ranked #1 overall; Singapore ranked among the top 7 on 62 factors and ranked #2 overall; and Finland ranked among the top 7 on 53 factors and ranked #3 overall.
Here are the numbers of #1 rankings for each of the top three countries in WEF's overall composite rankings: Switzerland 14; Singapore 12; Finland 9.
Perhaps the main reason the U.S. ranked as high as #7 overall is that this country is larger than most of its competitors. The only other large countries among the top 10 overall were #6 Germany, and #10 Japan. Germany ranked among the top 7 on 22 factors, and was ranked #1 on 3; Japan ranked among the top 7 on 25 factors, and was ranked #1 on 8. But, of course, the U.S. is even larger than either of those two countries.
The WEF rankings are definitely slanted so as to boost the overall ranking for large countries, at the expense of small countries.
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