The Netherlands and Switzerland score higher than the grand duchy.

Indicators of debt, trade, education, life expectancy, technology, government transparency, and many other categories were compiled to calculate macroeconomic stability, openness to catch-up, infrastructure, human capital, and institutional strength. The report came out on 22 January.

The “openness” criteria is trending downwards globally, but Luxembourg scores 10 out of 10 on this indicator.

The author of the KPMG Luxembourg expert blog post, Georges Bock, states that:

“The Grand Duchy’s lowest score is its 6.98 in human development, a full point below the top ten’s average of 7.98. The category looks at education, measured by school enrolment figures and data from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as life expectancy scores.”

He added that:

“Education is a hot-button issue in Luxembourg, notably for issues arising from multilingualism. Students have a diversity of native tongues and must navigate a public education system that gives instruction first in German and then in French—while communicating with each other largely in Luxembourgish. Despite, or perhaps because of, the emphasis on languages, Luxembourg has still managed to rank 7th worldwide in English proficiency in the EF English Proficiency Index (which excludes countries where English is the primary language), published in November 2017. The importance of English is further reflected in a recent trend, amongst state schools in Luxembourg, of introducing English streams. While I was not part of the GPI assessment process, I would venture that Luxembourg’s score was affected by its unique language situation, and the resulting comparative difficulty of its school system.”