UK ranks second in best European countries for startups

The United Kingdom has been ranked as the second-best country in Europe for startups, according to an analysis by NimbleFins.

The nation's venture capital accessibility and relative ease of doing business made up for its economic measures, such as lower GDP expectations and GDP per capita, and earned it a composite score of 5.9.

Germany snagged the top spot with a composite score of 5.5 (the lower the score, the better). The analysis cited the country's healthy economy and market dominance as reasons for the score.

Despite ranking the worst out of the top 12 for access to venture capital, Ireland still ranked third with a score of 6.2 because it has the lowest corporate tax rates in Europe (12.5%).

To create the rankings, NimbleFins collected data on general economic factors from the World Bank, World Economic Forum, UNESCO, OECD and tax consultancies. It specifically focused on four categories: economic health, cost of doing business, business climate and labour force quality.

Economic health data included GDP per capita, GDP growth rates and unemployment rates. Cost of doing business data included corporate taxes, cost of living ranks and salary expectation ranks.

Business climate focused on ease of starting a business, trust in the justice system and availability of venture capital funding and labour force quality examined primary and secondary education attainment rates and local availability of training.

From there, NimbleFins used these metrics to rank the top 50 European countries and calculated an average score for each. The composite score is an average of each category's score.

In order, Germany, UK, Ireland, Switzerland (6.3), Estonia (6.4), Czech Republic(6.6), Sweden (6.7), Norway (6.8), Finland (6.8), Netherlands (6.8), Austria (7.0) and Denmark (7.0) made up the final top 12.