Slovenia is placed just behind Latvia, which gained nine spots to finish in 55th place, and before Costa Rica, which improved its score by four places to rank 57th.

Switzerland has remained the world's most competitive economy.

The EU countries faring worse than Slovenia are Cyprus (58th place), Hungary (60th place), Bulgaria (62nd place), Slovakia (71st place), Romania (78th place) and Greece (96th place).

Slovenia's main trade partners meanwhile did much better with Germany ranking sixth, Austria 16th, France 21st and Italy 42nd.

Other countries of the former Yugoslavia lag behind Slovenia. Montenegro finished in 72nd place, Macedonia in the 80th, Croatia in 81st, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 88th and Serbia in 95th.

Slovenia got the best scores in the category higher education and training (23rd place) and health and primary education (24th place) and the worst in labour market efficiency (91st place) and financial market development 128th place).

In terms of the size of its market, Slovenia ranked 78th.

According to the WEF, the biggest obstacle to doing business in Slovenia is still access to financing, followed by inefficient government bureaucracy, restrictive labour regulations, tax rates, corruption and tax regulations.

The less problematic areas include work ethic in national labour force, innovation capacity, level of education of the workforce, infrastructure, political (in)stability, inflation and crime rate.

Slovenia tops the list when it comes to business costs of terrorism, and inflation. It also ranks high when it comes to business costs of crime and violence (12th place), legal protection of investors (24th place), and complexity and duration of procedures to start a business (3rd and 16th place, respectively).

But it did much worse in the protection of the interests of small shareholders (126th place), efficiency of legal framework in settling disputes (126th place), burden of government regulation (124th place) and efficacy of corporate boards (122nd place).