UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and Darden’s Institute for Business and Society have launched the Global Capitalism Index, a new measure that places Mauritius inside a 161-country scoring system for capitalism. The index uses eight subindices and searchable scores from 2009 to 2025, giving readers a common scale for comparing political economies.
Scott C. Miller, the Assistant Professor of Business Administration and Director of the Democracy and Capitalism Lab, said, “The problem is that if you ask anyone what capitalism is, the answers are all different.” He added, “We concluded that this word—capitalism—matters to everyone, so it matters to define it and measure how it really works across the globe.”
Karsh Institute of Democracy and Darden
The Global Capitalism Index measures the degree to which a country’s political economy supports global capitalism across eight subindices. It generates a score for every country in the world based on dozens of additional domains and hundreds of datasets, then places each result on a 0 to 100 scale. In 2025, 161 countries received a full GCI score.
The index’s public debut matters because it turns a broad debate into a comparable country-by-country dataset. Mauritius now sits inside the same system as every other country in the world, but the material here does not provide Mauritius’s own score or rank, so readers can compare it only through the index’s framework rather than through a country-specific number.
Scott C. Miller on institutions
Miller also said, “You need courts to protect property rights and institutions to prevent cronyism and ensure that markets are competitive,” followed by, “Government can and does get in the way of well-functioning capitalist systems,” and, “But the idea that capitalism is simply the absence of institutions is a myth.” That view sits at the center of the index: capitalism is not treated as the absence of government, but as a system that depends on courts and other institutions to function.
The 2025 mean GCI score was 63.5, compared with about 64.1 in 2009. Western Europe had the highest mean score at 85.3, while North America stood at 83.9. South Asia posted a mean score of 49.4, and Sub-Saharan Africa reached 50.7.
Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa
The regional spread shows how uneven the scorecard is. Western Europe’s mean score fell 4 points from 2009 to 2025, while only 12 countries exceeded a score of 90 and only 8 countries scored less than 30. For readers looking at Mauritius, the useful next step is to use the index’s searchable scores from 2009 to 2025 to see how the country compares across time and against the regional averages already published.
The open question now is simple: which country, including Mauritius, received what score and rank in the Global Capitalism Index?
