Georgia shows improvement in governance, education in latest global index

Georgia has been praised for its impressive performance in several areas including education and governance in a global index about prosperity.

The country’s good performance in many fields helped Georgia improve its overall prosperity rating over the last decade, the latest Prosperity Index revealed.

The Legatum Institute, a London based research institute released its 10th annual global Prosperity Index, a huge survey that ranked the most prosperous countries in the world.

This year Georgia ranked 84th of 149 nations surveyed.

Results were based on a range of factors including economic quality, business environment, governance, education, health, safety and security, personal freedom, social capital and environment. Each variable measured (using data from sources including World Health Organisation and World Bank) was given a weight depending on its importance.

In the Prosperity Sub-Index rankings, Georgia performed best in education and governance and scored lowest on the social capital sub-index.

In the 2016 ranking Georgia maintained the same position as in 2015 in all sub-indexes but showed improvement in safety and personal freedom during the past year.

The Prosperity Gap was also measured, which took the country's GDP and used it as a yardstick to measure the nation's expected Prosperity Index ranking.

Georgia has a small prosperity deficit signifying that it slightly under-delivers prosperity for its citizens compared to its wealth. Nevertheless, this is an excellent result compared to its regional peers,” the Legatum Institute said.

Armenia and Azerbaijan had much larger prosperity deficits than Georgia despite having similar wealth and prosperity ranks.

• Click here to see Georgia’s full profile.

For the last seven years of the Legatum Institute index, Norway has taken top spot in the annual report but in 2016 New Zealand was the world's most prosperous nation.