According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s (GEM) 2022 report, UAE has been ranked first globally as the best ecosystem for startups and entrepreneurs in 2022, ahead of the Netherlands, Finland, Saudi Arabia, and Lithuania.

The GEM report captures the perspectives of more than 2,000 relevant experts – at a minimum of 36 per country – across the 50 participating nations, to rank them in terms of their ability to encourage startups. Every year, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) presents its researched assessment of national entrepreneurial conditions. The aim of this is to rank countries in terms of their ability to encourage new businesses, which are of interest to policymakers and entrepreneurs alike. The UAE has the highest total score by a clear margin, having improved in 11 of the 13 framework conditions and scored highest of all 47 economies in four of them.

The GEM 2021/22 report includes a comprehensive National Expert Survey (NES), which captures the perspectives of more than 2,000 relevant experts – at a minimum of 36 per country – across the 50 participating countries, about the conditions governing entrepreneurship in their country. The methodology of the research assesses each country’s economy’s entrepreneurial ecosystem against nine Economic Framework Conditions (EFCs), as mentioned below:

Sources: GEM 2022 Report

GEM introduced the National Entrepreneurial Context Index (NECI), in 2018 to summarize in one number the pooled expert assessment of each economy’s EFCs. The NECI is simply the average of the pooled expert scores across the 13 framework conditions.

There are 33 economies that consistently participated in the GEM NES in each of the three years 2019, 2020, and 2021. Of those 33, there are six in which that economy’s NECI score increased each year: the largest increases were in Saudi Arabia (from 5.0 in 2019 to 6.1 in 2021), in the United Arab Emirates (from 5.8 to 6.8) and in the Republic of Korea (from 5.1 to 5.7). Moreover, it is no coincidence that the economies scoring highest for government efforts to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on new startups (Saudi Arabia), or for supporting women entrepreneurs (United Arab Emirates), are also economies that have seen consistent and substantial improvements in their NECI scores in recent years.