South Korea was the world's sixth most powerful country in 2022, according to rankings by a U.S. news outlet.

U.S. News and World Report released the rankings on Saturday after evaluating 85 countries based on responses from 17-thousand people around the world between April and July of last year.

U.S. News defined the world’s most powerful countries as “the ones that consistently dominate news headlines, preoccupy policymakers and shape global economic patterns.”

It noted that South Korea's high-tech, service-based economy is a foreign investment success story after transitioning from a recipient of aid to a donor, going on to steadily grow and reduce poverty since the 1960s to become one of the world’s largest overall economies.

South Korea ranked sixth in the category of "Power" but placed 20th in the category of "Best Countries" in 2022, down five notches from a year earlier.

The United States was the world's most powerful country, followed by China, Russia, Germany and Britain. South Korea came in sixth, ahead of France and Japan in seventh and eighth, respectively.