IMD World Competitiveness Ranking 2025
IMD, Lausanne · Published June 2025
Latest edition: June 2025 · Next expected: June 2027
This ranking is misleading. The full data sits behind a commercial paywall, and a third of the score comes from an executive survey with no published random-sample design.
What the report claims
The IMD World Competitiveness Ranking scores 69 economies on four factors: economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure, split into 20 sub-factors at equal weight. Two-thirds of the score is hard statistical data and one-third is an executive opinion survey. India ranks 41st of 69, down from 39th in 2024 but up from 43rd in 2021. The factor structure and weights are documented, and the hard series are attributed to international and national statistics. The ranking measures the formal business environment.
The Credibility Score, dimension by dimension
- Methodology transparency / replicability
- 6 / 20
- Source verifiability + measurement integrity
- 7 / 25
- Internal consistency of India’s place
- 7 / 20
- Construct validity / India coverage
- 3 / 10
- Independence and funding
- 5 / 20
- Accountability (corrections, versioning)
- 2 / 5
Funding and independence: IMD is a private Swiss business school funded by tuition, executive education, corporate programs, and sales of the competitiveness yearbook and database, and it does not publish an itemised breakdown of funders or amounts for the ranking. The survey is fielded through national partner institutes, some of which are public or quasi-public bodies with economic policy interests. There is no independent academic oversight board or external peer-review mechanism for the ranking, and no public errata register, though annual editions are archived.
Sources: IMD, Lausanne, IMD World Competitiveness Ranking 2025
Updated 9 November 2026