As a collaboration between the St. Gallen Symposium and the Foundation for Value Creation, the 2023 Barometer assesses the extent to which countries’ economic models create value not only for the current, but particularly for young and future generations. While Denmark tops the list, the United States fall behind.

While the current world population stands at just above 8 billion, around 11 billion people are projected to inhabit our planet by the end of this century. What awaits earth’s new citizens? As a collaboration between the St. Gallen Symposium and the Foundation for Value Creation, as part of the 2023 Elite Quality Index (EQx), the NextGen Value Creation Barometer focuses on countries’ long-term economic and social value creation – not only for current, but particularly for young and future generations.

This is why the Barometer assesses five key categories: Ecology and Natural Capital, Equitable Opportunities, Education and Human Capital, Health and Well-Being, as well as Innovation and Technology. With a further evolved methodology compared to its 2022 pilot, the findings from this year’s Barometer once again underscore the importance of focusing on the most long-term dimensions of Value Creation and extraction, the conceptual foundation of the EQx, with several noteworthy findings.

• Among the top 15 ranked countries, we find many smaller, European economies. The social democratic Scandinavian economies all score highly and substantially better when compared to the overall EQx 2023, with Denmark ranked # 1 in this year’s Barometer.

• Rankings in the NextGen Value Creation Barometer and the overall EQx differ substantially, which underlines that the intergenerational value relationship, which the Barometer seeks to capture, is a distinct socio-economic phenomenon.

• While the United States is ranked # 21 in the EQx, it drops precipitously to # 76 in the Barometer, mainly due to one of the world’s largest environmental footprints per capita, high economic inequality, and expensive, but patchy health care coverage. North African countries (e.g., Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) all improve their scores substantially compared to the EQx, through relatively strong investments and outcomes in education and health. In turn, the deep entanglement of Gulf countries in the fossil fuel economy explains why they drop by up to 95 ranking places, as is the case for Bahrain (from # 35 to # 130).

• The Barometer captures inherent contradictions within the multi-dimensional concept of long-term Value Creation for young and future generations. Across almost all the wealthy, OECD economies at the top of our ranking, the creation of opportunities in terms of education, health and technology is built on highly extractive relationships with environmental ecosystems. If we consider only the ecological dimensions, there is an almost complete reshuffling of the rankings with countries from the Global South and the African continent at the top and Gulf states, Canada, the United States, but also China and South Korea, at the very bottom.

• The data underscores the need for a differentiated interpretation of our results, relying on a category-by-category analysis in order to suggest specific policies while retaining a holistic understanding of long-term Value Creation.

In its concern for long-term Value Creation for young and future generations, the Barometer is a key impact project of the initiative for ‘A New Generational Contract’, which the St. Gallen Symposium launched together with the Club of Rome in May 2022. Over the coming years, and through cross-generational dialogues, advocacy in global policy and business fora, and other tangible projects, such as the Barometer, the initiative will foster mutual learning and a deep understanding of what better futures entail while seeking equity between generations.

Read and Download the Full NextGen Value Creation Barometer 2023 here (external link to SSRN).