To further understand the extent to which governments are following through on their commitments to create genuinely open economies, ICC commissioned the development of an Open Markets Index (OMI) to generate a balanced and reliable measurement of a country’s openness to trade. It uniquely combines indicators of actual, de facto, openness of markets with those reflecting government measures considered barriers to market entry.
The results of the OMI serve two purposes:
The ranking of national market performance on openness to trade from most to least open is an effective way to concentrate attention on the need for improvements and to monitor progress.
The evaluation of a country’s performance across four indicators of openness to trade constitutes a tool for policymakers and authorities to identify deficiencies that deserve greater attention, thereby generating a roadmap of sorts for action and improvement.
ICC published the 2nd edition of the Open Markets Index in spring 2013. The 2013 index found that the average score across the 75 measured countries was 3.6/5.0, indicating a slight improvement on 2011′s average score of 3.5. The two highest performing economies, and the only two ranked as excellent in terms of overall openness (scoring above 5.0), were Hong Kong and Singapore. Meanwhile the worst-performing economies (scoring below 2.0), were Uganda, Bangladesh, Sudan and Ethiopia.
The latest report can be downloaded here:
