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Why has China lowered its own ranking in global financial competitiveness?
A Beijing think tank dropped China’s world ranking to fifth place, behind the US, Japan, UK and Germany following stock market volatility
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Zhu Wenqianin Beijing
A Beijing-based governmental think tank has taken the rare step of lowering China’s global financial competitiveness ranking by one place, despite top leaders of the world’s second-largest economy vowing to build it into a financial superpower.
China ranks fifth globally in financial competitiveness in 2026, behind the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and Germany, slipping one place from last year’s standing, a new report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) found.
“China’s lower ranking, mainly due to stock market volatility in 2024 and 2025, put it 0.09 points behind Germany,” said Liu Dongmin, a senior research fellow at the Institute of World Economics and Politics of the CASS.
Countries ranking from sixth to 10th were Canada, South Korea, France, Australia and Switzerland, respectively, said the report, which evaluated 31 countries globally and was released on Friday during the Global Digital Economy Conference 2026 in Beijing.
Introduced in 2021, the ranking system evaluates economies on five criteria: the competitiveness of the financial industry, currency, financial infrastructure, fintech and international financial governance.
Global financial competitiveness refers to an economy’s ability to allocate financial resources and manage risks more efficiently than others to drive economic and social development, CASS said.
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