Evaluating the influence of country characteristics on the Higher Education System Rankings' progress

World University Rankings (WUR) measure institutions in different ways. These rankings can take into account research quality and revenue, surveys of academics and employers, staff-student ratios, and statistics on demographics such as the number of international students. The Higher Education System Rankings assess national higher education systems, and meet a long-standing need to shift discussion from the ranking of the world's best universities, to the best overall systems in each country. The underlying factors that make a country have the higher number of universities in the World University Rankings is a recent focus of attention and this paper contributes in this matter. We find out that besides the country's economic potential, the policy and regulatory environment and the level of connectivity of their universities determine the results to become a solid group of best-ranked university system. Moreover, in order to reflect the country's overall performance in world university rankings we propose a new Excellence/Quality indicator based on the excellence level reached by their Top universities within the Top positions of the WUR weighted by the country's size population. For this purpose, the countries with universities at the Top 300 positions of the QS World University Ranking 2018 are analyzed. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.