Well, policy in large organizations and especially public policy on the scale of nations is a lot like orbital mechanics. You can head off in a particular direction, but you're going to end up somewhere completely different from where a lot of people might intuitively expect.

Since you're looking only at national scale for now: A good measure for people being rewarded based on merit is social mobility. Which countries do you expect to have better social mobility? Countries that have a strong social-democratic element, or countries that are purely capitalist?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...

If you ever decide to try to implement strict Meritocracy at a smaller scale when actually locally organizing your own local organizations, please let me know; I'll bring popcorn. ;)