Does a country’s IOI success come from GDP, schools — or something else?

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Some small countries do very well at the IOI — is that luck, culture, money, or a training system?

Or maybe because some developed countries don't care about IOI at all, so there is no investment in it? If that's the case in your country, please leave a comment. By the way, why do you think that is?

See the first 20 countries at the IOI website (the full list is here):

The first 20 countries at the IOI

Also, this is the diagram showing the relation between a country’s IOI rank and its GDP per capita. A higher GDP per capita usually means the country is more developed and people have a good standard of living, so they can invest in areas that are not essential for survival. As you can see, there is no meaningful correlation between these two parameters!

Correlation between GDP per capita and IOI rank (click to see high quality photo)

Knowing the experience of other countries and the reasons behind their good results would help the community benefit from others’ experiences and grow CP in all countries.

Please share with us why your country is great or not great at IOI.

Let me start by telling you the story behind our success in Olympiads, including IOI. Iran is very good at Olympiads, as you may know. We took third place in five main important international Olympiads, considering overall performance. To find the root cause, we should go back in time. Iran participated in the IMO for the first time in 1985. The President at the time was a supporter of Olympiads and elites. The result was great. Shortly, a few laws were passed in favor of Olympiads:

National gold medal winners can enter any university without participating in the university entrance exam. The number of gold medals is twice the team size, e.g., there are eight gold medals for the Iran National Informatics Olympiads.
Other national medal winners (around 40 people in each Olympiad) get 20% added to their final score in the university entrance exam. This is a huge number.

Giving such big advantages to people who try for Olympiads made big communities participate in Olympiads. For example, around one hundred thousand Iranian students participated in Olympiads last year. Seven thousand of them participated in the Informatics Olympiad.

I made a YouTube Short describing the politics of our high schools regarding the IOI.