2015's Most And Least Reliable Countries To Do Business In

Are you looking for new international suppliers for your company? Or thinking about where to open an overseas office? When you evaluate your international customers, do you care about the stability of their business environment? What about government corruption? If you already have foreign offices, have you checked on the risks of natural disasters like floods and earthquakes in those locations? How sound is the infrastructure there?
For country-by-country shortcut answers to those questions, consider the “2015 FM Global Resilience Index,” a ranking of 130 countries by FM Global, the 180-year-old international commercial and industrial insurance company based in Johnston, RI. FM Global’s main business: providing loss prevention services to big companies around the globe.
FM Global puts countries through a rigorous evaluation process and produces a list of the places it deems most resilient. Landing in first place is a country that may not be at the top of your list for opening a subsidiary or factory: Norway (ExxonMobil has operated there for more than 120 years; ConocoPhillips also has longstanding oil fields there). Coming in second is a more obvious choice, given its bank secrecy laws and stable political environment: Switzerland. The Netherlands, with its healthy economy, solid infrastructure, sophisticated ports, extensive offshore wind power system, and secure dyke system, is in third place.
The U.S. doesn’t rank until 10^th place and then only for a portion of the country FM Global calls Region 3, made up of 26 states in the Southwest, Midwest, and the South, plus Washington, DC., which FM Global deems safe from wind storms and earthquakes. The U.S.’s Region 1, which includes Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey and New York, is vulnerable to storms and places 16^th on the list. U.S. Region 3, threatened by earthquakes, ranks in 21^st place, just behind the United Kingdom and above Portugal. Region 3 includes California, Oregon, Hawaii and Alaska.
FM Global’s methodology involves measuring countries’ strength in nine areas, under three rubrics: economic, risk quality and supply chain. It looks at these nine things:
1. GDP per capita
2. Political risk including terrorism
3. “Oil intensity,” meaning the chance the country will experience an oil shortage
4. Exposure to natural hazards
5. “Quality of natural hazard risk management,” meaning the country’s preparedness to deal with a disaster like an earthquake or a flood
6. Quality of fire risk management
7. Control of corruption
8. Quality of the infrastructure
9. Quality of local supplies
FM Global used the following sources: The International Monetary Fund supplies the GDP data, the information about the oil supply is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and the data on political risk and corruption comes from the World Bank’s “Worldwide Governance Indicators,” which pulls from 31 data sources. The Global Competitiveness Report, put together by the World Economic Forum and based on its survey of thousands of executives, is the source of the data on infrastructure and local supply chain quality. Finally the data on risks like exposure to natural hazards, readiness to manage natural calamities and ability to fight fires, all come from an algorithm FM Global developed to calculate risk at more than 100,000 commercial properties it insures around the world.
There are no surprises among the top 25 countries, which I’ll list below. They’re mostly European—Ireland, Luxembourg, Germany, Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, etc. New Zealand and Australia also make the top 25, as do Hong Kong, Singapore and Qatar.