13 | PwC’s 21st CEO Survey Threats: What Keeps CEOs Up at Night Differs By Region This anxiety shows up clearly in CEOs’ assessment of the threats to their organisation’s growth prospects. ‘Extreme concern’ levels climb across almost all the main threats we measure. An interesting exception is over-regulation, which stayed flat at 42%. That’s not to say that over- regulation is no longer a top concern – in fact, it is the top concern globally, and in the top five across every region surveyed (see Exhibits 7 and 8). It’s just that it’s always been a top concern – in fact the top ‘extreme concern’ since we began asking the question in 2008. Now others are rising to the fore, such as terrorism – which vaulted from No. 12 to No. 2 overall –and geopolitical uncertainty, which is a top-five threat in every region except Asia-Pacific, where it ranks sixth.