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NCBNational Capability Benchmark
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Challenge the benchmark

Choose a score and give the benchmark a specific reason to reconsider it.

When you submit, the form attaches the current score and confidence for the country and capability you chose.

Submissions are public and start as awaiting review. A maintainer can add a response and signature after review.

Where does the United Arab Emirates stand on Building?

Dataset 9.3.0

This page reads one capability from the published data and is recomputed with every release. It separates what the United Arab Emirates does, which makes the score, from what the country has, which sits beside the score, and places the country among the 10 countries at the nearest income. The text describes the data and recommends no policy.

What does the score rest on?

Score40.6Confidence0.55usable evidence

The Building score is the equal-weight mean of the positions of four indicators on a 0 to 100 scale that every country sets together. Confidence measures the evidence behind the score and sits beside it as a second number.

The Building score tracks GDP per capita at r = 0.57 across 123 countries.

Observed indicators

  • Manufacturing value added

    9.4 % of GDP

    World Bank (NV.IND.MANF.ZS), 2024

    Position on the scale24.7Peer median32.310 peers with a value

  • High-technology exports

    9 % of manufactured exports

    World Bank (TX.VAL.TECH.MF.ZS), 2023

    Position on the scale14.6Peer median31.810 peers with a value

  • Electricity connection speed

    100 score 0-100

    World Bank (IC.ELC.TIME.DFRN), 2019

    Position on the scale100.0Peer median80.210 peers with a value

  • Economic fitness

    0.84 index

    World Bank (EF.EFM.UNIV.XD), 2024

    Position on the scale23.1Peer median84.610 peers with a value

No comparable source yet, so lowering confidence: large project delivery and firm scale-up rate.

What the United Arab Emirates has to work with

Beside each condition, two r values read every country at once, one against income and one against the capability score. Where the r with income is much higher than the r with the score, having the condition goes with being rich more than with the capability measured.

Conditions, not scored

What the country has to work with on this capability. The values are shown as the source published them and are not part of the score, the confidence or the trend. The rank counts the countries with a value, best first.

  • Output per workerWorld Bank (SL.GDP.PCAP.EM.KD), 2024

    108,203 constant 2021 PPP $, rank 19 of 123. GDP per person employed, constant purchasing power parity.

    A condition, not scored: output per worker is income per worker, the wealth the benchmark tests capability against, so it is published beside Building as context (D122).

    • r with income: 0.88 (123 countries)
    • r with the Building score: 0.6 (123 countries)
    • Peer median: 130,532 constant 2021 PPP $ (10 peers with a value)

Where does the United Arab Emirates sit among its peers?

The peers are the 10 countries at the nearest income. Income is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, in constant international dollars, for the latest year the World Bank publishes, and distance is measured on a log scale, where half and double are equally far. No country is picked by hand, and the set changes when the data does.

In this release peer income runs from US$ 57,990 to US$ 85,732, and the United Arab Emirates has US$ 69,702 (2024).

0255075100United Arab Emirates
  • Solid ring: usable or good evidence
  • Broken ring: thin evidence, opening further as confidence falls
  • The shaded band is the middle half of the set and the line inside it is the median.
  • Switzerland: 72.7
  • Germany: 68.8
  • United States: 59.2
  • Netherlands: 57.2
  • Austria: 53.9
  • Denmark: 52.9
  • Belgium: 47.0
  • Sweden: 45.1
  • Canada: 44.7
  • United Arab Emirates: 40.6
  • Australia: 39.5

What separates the United Arab Emirates from its peers?

The United Arab Emirates scores 40.6 on Building, below the median of the 10 scored peers, which is 53.4.

Indicators placed above the peer median on the scale: electricity connection speed.

Indicators placed below the peer median on the scale: manufacturing value added, high-technology exports, and economic fitness.

The United Arab Emirates has less than the peer median of output per worker.

Each sentence compares one position with one median. Why a difference exists, and what to do about it, lie outside this data.

What this reading does not show

  • A national score is a coarse proxy. A capability forms in firms, cities, networks and groups below the level of the country, and a national average only describes the conditions they work in.
  • Peers share income and nothing else. Size, production structure, region and political regime are outside the rule, and a set of 10 countries can change with any revision to GDP.
  • An r reads the whole set at once and says nothing about one country alone. A correlation does not show a cause either.
  • The known artefacts that bear on Building, described on the limits page: artefact A6, artefact A11.
  • And the ones every score in the benchmark carries: artefact A8, artefact A10.