The Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government (MBRSG) released the third edition of the Global Economic Diversification Index (EDI) at the 2024 World Governments Summit (WGS).
The Global EDI considers multiple dimensions, including:
- The diversification of economic activities,
- International trade patterns, and
- The composition of government revenues, to evaluate and rank countries based on the breadth of their economic diversification.
The 2024 Global EDI broadened its analysis to cover 112 countries, up from 105 in the previous year.
The expanded analysis also extended from 2000 to the COVID-19-affected years of 2020-2022, utilising 25 publicly available quantitative indicators to measure countries’ economic diversification.
For the first time, the Index introduced three digital-trade-specific indicators, leading to the creation of a revised trade subindex named Trade+.
This addition enables a more detailed examination of digital trade’s role in economic diversification, resulting in a new EDI+ score, calculated for the years 2010-2022, for a subset of 106 countries.
2024 Global EDI key findings:
– The United States, China and Germany maintained their positions as the top three diversified economies.
– Western European nations accounted for almost two-thirds of the top 20 highly ranked nations.
– High-income nations dominated the top 30 diversified economies, with notable inclusions of upper-middle-income countries such as China, Mexico, Thailand, and the lower-middle-income country, India.
– The MENA region saw a significant reduction in its representation among the bottom 20 ranks, decreasing to 10 per cent in 2022 from 25 per cent in 2000.
– South Asian economies exhibited a substantial improvement in their economic diversification, particularly when digital trade was taken into account. This was evident in their Trade+ scores and the broader EDI+ rankings.
– Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, especially the UAE and Bahrain, have shown notable progress in their EDI scores, attributed to accelerated reforms post-pandemic, including technology sector investments, tax base expansions, trade liberalisation, and regulatory improvements.
The full EDI report can also be downloaded in both Arabic and English from the MBRSG’s policy research repository at www.MBRSG.ae/Research