The Financial Times’ guide to Europe’s finance ministers offers an imperfect but insightful league table of economic and political skills. This year it has been expanded to cover non-eurozone countries, and designed to reflect the broad range of skills need at a time of exceptional financial and economic turmoil.

Now in its third year, the FT survey benchmarks performance, to reveal who is the best performing and most respected – as well as potential future stars. The challenges this year were greater than ever.