For a couple of decades now, Lausanne’s Institute for Management Development (IMD) has published what many consider to be the leading annual ranking of the world’s most competitive countries. This year, the Swiss business school has gone one step further. It has indulged in the fashion for stress testing by drawing up a stress test ranking of countries expected to cope better with the financial crisis and rebound quicker than others.

The US continues to lead the IMD’s traditional world competitiveness league table, but it comes a miserable 28 in the new stress test rankings. This appears to underline the depth of the crisis in the US and the time it will take to solve it. In contrast, smaller nations with fewer than 30m inhabitants in northern Europe and south-east Asia scored strongly in the stress testing – with Denmark finishing top.