Malta has been placed in a very prestigious fifth place world-wide in the Open Market Index published by the International Chamber of Commerce.
Malta registered a score of 4.7, equalled by The Netherlands, while ahead of it there is Belgium (4.8), Luxembourg (4.9) Singapore and Hong Kong which are both first.
The authors explain: “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.”
ICC published the 2nd edition of the Open Markets Index in spring 2013. The 2013 index found that the average score across the 75 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.
G20 economies in general were found to be behind the global standard, with an average aggregate score of 3.4. Of all the countries, only Canada ranks in the top 20 worldwide (19th), while Germany ranks 22nd, the UK 29th, France 35th, and the US 38th.
G20 countries were found to perform poorest on average in terms of observed openness to trade, with 19 of the 20 scoring only average or below average on this measure.
The BRICS nations, once the darlings of the world economy, are falling behind other developed regions with regard to international trade. With the sole exception of South Africa, BRICS countries record below average indicators of trade openness. Brazil, Russia, India and China all scored between 2.0 and 3.0, while South Africa registered an aggregate score of 3.2.
One of the main causes for poor performance among these economies was restrictive trade policy regimes, with generally higher than average tariff levels.
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.
More information can be found at http://www.iccwbo.org/Global-influence/G20/Reports-and-Products/Open-Markets-Index/