Playing to win: understanding the pressures of cross-border business
Today’s businesses are navigating more countries, more regulation and more uncertainty than ever before — often with less clarity than they should have. As rules fragment and compliance costs rise, complexity has become one of the most decisive forces in global strategy.
And for over a decade, the Global Business Complexity Index has provided a simple, objective view of the operating environment for international businesses. The index captures over 200 data points per jurisdiction and the 81 jurisdictions it covers represent over 90% of the world economy.
The scope of the index is the set of rules for running a company within a country – the accounting, legal and employment burden that a firm will face. That is narrower than the full set of factors that might cause a company to invest in a country, whether the international trade rules and tariffs or wider local considerations such as the market opportunity, infrastructure and rule of law. It nevertheless captures the real costs and risks to doing business in a country that need to be managed, as multinational organisations face daily decisions on where to put both their financial and human resources.
The index is intended to be a detailed, helpful guide on what to expect so that the risk of compliance breach is avoided, with the data made available as a public good. We also hope it encourages governments all over the world to seek to improve their ranking by dealing with any unnecessary bureaucracy that offers little societal gain and simply makes it harder for local and international businesses to operate in their jurisdiction.
There are some important trends in the direction of travel this year, many of which were prominent in last year’s report and continue into 2026. First, many firms are spreading themselves more widely, driven by the desire to diversify the US concentration risk highlighted in tariff policy and by the broadening economic opportunity reflected in many new trade deals, such as EU-Mercosur and EU-India. At the same time, the rule book in many countries is getting more onerous. This reflects both geopolitical fragmentation, which is producing increasingly disparate regulatory regimes, and a tendency for rules to be introduced at speed in response to political pressure, often without sufficient guidance or consistent enforcement.
While it goes beyond the scope of the index, the report also looks at how companies manage complexity. If their commercial path forces them to deal with more countries of growing complexity, companies can still act to reduce their internal complexity in how they manage things. We note very varied levels of complexity in how companies are set up for a given level of geographic coverage – their legal entity count and the often very fragmented way in which these are managed. With the high level of uncertainty that businesses now face – at time of writing, the twin challenges of an AI revolution and of world peace are both very much in play – structural simplification is also a source of greater flexibility and an opportunity to pivot as circumstances require.
