ince the launch of the first edition of the Good Country Index in 2014, there have been a lot of questions about the GCI. What is its purpose? What is it measuring, exactly, and what can we glean from the rankings? Are they fair? Why should we care?
You can find some of the most commonly asked questions and their answers- as well as points most requiring clarification - below. You can also find the full FAQ here.
What’s all this about, then?
The Good Country Index tries to measure how much each country on earth contributes to the planet and to the human race.
Why?
A: Because the biggest challenges facing humanity today are global and borderless: climate change, economic crisis, terrorism, drug trafficking, slavery, pandemics, poverty and inequality, population growth, food and water shortages, energy, species loss, human rights, migration ... the list goes on. All of these problems stretch across national borders, so the only way they can be properly tackled is through international efforts. The trouble is, most countries carry on behaving as if they were islands, focusing on developing domestic solutions to domestic problems. We’ll never get anywhere unless we start to change this habit. The Good Country Index isn’t interested in how well countries are doing, it’s interested in how much they are doing.
But there are so many indexes and surveys that measure how countries behave. Surely, we don’t need another one?
Almost all of them measure country performance in isolation: whether it’s economic growth, stability, justice, transparency, good governance, productivity, democracy, freedom, or even happiness, it’s always measured per country. The Good Country Index tries to measure the global impacts of policies and behaviors: what they contribute to the “global commons”, and what they take away. This forms a truer and more realistic global balance‐sheet than one which carries on pretending that each country sits on its own private planet. The concept of the “Good Country” is all about encouraging populations and their governments to be more outward looking, and to consider the international consequences of their national behavior.
What do you mean, “good”? Surely all countries are partly good and partly bad?
Try thinking of “good” as a measure of how much a country contributes to the common good. So, in this context “good” means the opposite of “selfish”, not the opposite of “bad”. The Good Country Index isn’t trying to make any moral judgments: it just measures, as objectively as possible, what each country contributes to the common good, and what it takes away.
What do you expect people to do with these results?
To urge their governments to look at the total impact of their policies. It’s no longer enough to provide prosperity, growth, justice and peace to one population alone: the international consequences of every action must be considered. Economic growth is a good thing, but not if it’s at the cost of the environment or the wellbeing of another country or species. Competition between nations is increasingly looking like a dangerous idea. It’s up to us to tell these things to our politicians, and the Good Country Index can help get the message across.
Who’s behind this?
The ‘Good Country’ concept and the Good Country Index were developed by Simon Anholt. The Index was built by Dr. Robert Govers with support from many other colleagues and institutions (see contributor acknowledgements on www.goodcountry.org), and funded by Simon Anholt.
How did you choose the indicators?
Although more and more reliable data about countries is collected every year, it’s still patchy. So, we have to be pretty clever about using the good, robust, available data as ‘tokens’ for the qualities we’re looking for. Most of the indicators we use are very direct measurements of world‐friendly or world‐unfriendly behavior (such as signing of international treaties, pollution, acts of terrorism, wars, etc.) and some are rather indirect (such as Nobel prizes, exports of scientific journals, etc.), but they add up to a pretty good picture of whether each country is basically a net creditor to the rest of humanity in each of the seven categories, or whether it’s a free‐rider on the global system and ought to be recognized as such.
This is surely a very incomplete picture of the world. You can’t possibly reduce a country’s entire contribution to humanity and the planet down to 35 indicators.
Correct. But it’s a start, and we welcome constructive contributions. It willprobably never be possible to give a complete answer on any of these issues, but it’s surely better to get the debate going than to keep silent.
Why do some countries rank unexpectedly high in certain categories?
The Good Country Index is different from other country rankings, because it looks at the external impact of countries, not their domestic performance. This often produces a different picture of the world than the one we’re used to seeing: an unfamiliar, but revealing picture.
You can see this clearly in the “Science & Technology” and “Culture” categories, where we often find countries not normally associated with these fields ranking very high. But we’re not attempting to assess how advanced countries are technologically, or how powerful or ancient their cultures are: we are simply measuring how active and effective they are in sharing the scientific, technological and cultural assets they have with populations around the world.
For example, Belgium often ranks very high in the ‘Culture’ ranking: this doesn’t imply that Belgium has “more culture” than, for example, Greece, Mexico or China: it means that, relative to its size, Belgium works harder at sharing its cultural activities and outputs with the international community - as far as it’s possible to measure these things with the available data.
Similarly, the United States is of course among the world’s most advanced countries in terms of the quantity, quality and importance of its scientific and technological activity, but it doesn’t rank at the top of this category because there are a number of other countries which, in proportion to the size of their economies, do a better job of sharing what technology and scientific knowledge they do produce. (Note that we don’t count commercial exports of scientific and technological goods in the ranking because as far as possible we try to keep this a measurement of countries, not companies).
It’s not fair to penalize poor countries by ranking them low in the Good Country Index: they would give more to the world if they had the money, time, skills, education, peace, health, etc.
For most indicators, each country’s score in the Good Country Index is divided by its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) so that smaller and poorer countries aren’t unduly penalized in the ranking for their limited ability to ‘make a difference’ in the world. Having said this, the Good Country Index isn’t passing any kind of judgment on countries, nor is it commenting on the reasons behind any country’s scores. It is certainly true that countries which need to focus on severe domestic challenges tend to be more concerned about their own populations and their own stability than those of other countries. Maybe this is right, and maybe it’s not: one for further discussion.
Did you try other normalizations such as GNI or per capita?
Yes. As it happens, the ranking is not hugely sensitive to different normalizations. A per capita normalization is equally legitimate but it does tend to punish impoverished countries, which is something we wanted to avoid.
You’ve included several territories in the list which aren’t sovereign states. Why is this?
We include any territory that reports enough accurate data for it to be ranked in the Good Country Index. No judgment is implied about the sovereign status, or otherwise, of any territory included in the list: these are all places that behave like countries to the extent of measuring and reporting their behavior to the United Nations and other international agencies as if they were countries, and that’s good enough for us.
You’ve left out a number of territories/nations. Why is this?
Territories are included or excluded from the Index purely on the basis of the available data. Countries with missing data on more than 2 out of 5 indicators on any category are generally excluded, except in a handful of cases where there are very few missing values overall.
In total, 169 countries are included in this year’s Index. Since the rankings are based on mean scores per category and missing values are ignored, the countries included in the Index are neither rewarded nor punished for any non‐reporting.
What year does the Good Country Index refer to?
Because the data in the 35 indicators which make up the Good Country Index are collected in different forms and at different times for different reasons, it’s impossible to focus the Index on any single year—some indicators report on things which have happened during the previous year, a few of them are constantly updated, and some of them relate to behaviors which may have taken place up to a decade earlier. For this reason, we’ve used mostly 2020 data for the current edition of the Good Country Index. It’s as close as the available data allows to a complete portrait of the world today.
What about the recent scandal/invasion/attack/war/policy/election in country x? Should they be at the bottom of the Good Country Index because of that?
The Good Country Index doesn’t react to specific events because there’s usually no objective way of measuring their immediate impact on the world. Many behaviors—such as wars, for example—will, in time, be reflected in the data sources that the Good Country Index is based on (for example, the UCDP‐PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset in the case of wars) and so they will be accounted for in future updates. But as yet we have no reliable mechanism for reacting to one‐off episodes. We’re working on this, and suggestions are gratefully received.
This isn’t fair. You’re blaming entire countries for something their government is responsible for, and rewarding governments for things their population have done without state help.
The Good Country Index doesn’t attempt to distinguish between different actors in each country, which in many cases would be impossible anyway. We treat each country as a whole and simply measure what, as a whole, its impact is on the world. Others are welcome to debate how the praise or blame should be apportioned to government, civil society, individuals or companies.
This is culturally biased. The values you’ve chosen as ‘good for humanity / good for the planet’ are based on a liberal, Western, capitalist view of the world.
They try to be as universal as possible. This isn’t rocket‐science: in the end it’s pretty obvious that starting wars or polluting the atmosphere is doing no favors to the world, and most people from most cultural backgrounds would agree with that. And we aren’t proposing any complete or definitive answer to what constitutes a Good Country: this index hopes to be the beginning of a global debate which might one day lead to such an understanding.
I’m surprised to see countries like Egypt and Nigeria among the best performers in the peace and security category. Why is this?
On the whole, the countries that score well in this category do not export arms; they are not directly involved in international violent conflicts (except in some cases as peacekeepers); they tend to have tight cyber‐security, and may contribute significantly to UN peacekeeping missions with troops and/or funds. Of course, several of them have a great deal to worry about at home, including violent conflicts within their own borders, and their contribution to international peace and security is often a largely passive one: they do very little harm overseas, rather than doing a lot of good. Still, the net effect is positive and this is what earns them their high ranking in this particular category—even if, in many cases, their overall contribution to the common good is let down by lower scores in other categories.
Final Words
It’s important to emphasize again that the Good Country Index only measures theinternational impacts of countries; what they do at home is well documented in many other studies and surveys. The fact that domestic behavior isn’t included in the Good Country Index of course doesn’t mean we excuse, condone, minimize or overlook it in any way: it’s simply not the thing that we’re measuring.
Remember that when we talk about a ‘good country’ we’re not attempting to judge its overall moral standing: we’re measuring its impact on the rest of the world, its contribution to the common good. You can’t get a complete picture of any country without considering both domestic and international factors, and we would always encourage people to consider the Good Country Index scores alongside some reliable measures of domestic behavior.
Read the new edition of the Good Country Index for free here and review the data here.
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Good Country Index: A Selection of Q&A
Photo by Jon Tyson via Unsplash.
March 29, 2022
S
ince the launch of the first edition of the Good Country Index in 2014, there have been a lot of questions about the GCI. What is its purpose? What is it measuring, exactly, and what can we glean from the rankings? Are they fair? Why should we care?
You can find some of the most commonly asked questions and their answers- as well as points most requiring clarification - below. You can also find the full FAQ here.
What’s all this about, then?
The Good Country Index tries to measure how much each country on earth contributes to the planet and to the human race.
Why?
A: Because the biggest challenges facing humanity today are global and borderless: climate change, economic crisis, terrorism, drug trafficking, slavery, pandemics, poverty and inequality, population growth, food and water shortages, energy, species loss, human rights, migration ... the list goes on. All of these problems stretch across national borders, so the only way they can be properly tackled is through international efforts. The trouble is, most countries carry on behaving as if they were islands, focusing on developing domestic solutions to domestic problems. We’ll never get anywhere unless we start to change this habit. The Good Country Index isn’t interested in how well countries are doing, it’s interested in how much they are doing.
But there are so many indexes and surveys that measure how countries behave. Surely, we don’t need another one?
Almost all of them measure country performance in isolation: whether it’s economic growth, stability, justice, transparency, good governance, productivity, democracy, freedom, or even happiness, it’s always measured per country. The Good Country Index tries to measure the global impacts of policies and behaviors: what they contribute to the “global commons”, and what they take away. This forms a truer and more realistic global balance‐sheet than one which carries on pretending that each country sits on its own private planet. The concept of the “Good Country” is all about encouraging populations and their governments to be more outward looking, and to consider the international consequences of their national behavior.
What do you mean, “good”? Surely all countries are partly good and partly bad?
Try thinking of “good” as a measure of how much a country contributes to the common good. So, in this context “good” means the opposite of “selfish”, not the opposite of “bad”. The Good Country Index isn’t trying to make any moral judgments: it just measures, as objectively as possible, what each country contributes to the common good, and what it takes away.
What do you expect people to do with these results?
To urge their governments to look at the total impact of their policies. It’s no longer enough to provide prosperity, growth, justice and peace to one population alone: the international consequences of every action must be considered. Economic growth is a good thing, but not if it’s at the cost of the environment or the wellbeing of another country or species. Competition between nations is increasingly looking like a dangerous idea. It’s up to us to tell these things to our politicians, and the Good Country Index can help get the message across.
Who’s behind this?
The ‘Good Country’ concept and the Good Country Index were developed by Simon Anholt. The Index was built by Dr. Robert Govers with support from many other colleagues and institutions (see contributor acknowledgements on www.goodcountry.org), and funded by Simon Anholt.
How did you choose the indicators?
Although more and more reliable data about countries is collected every year, it’s still patchy. So, we have to be pretty clever about using the good, robust, available data as ‘tokens’ for the qualities we’re looking for. Most of the indicators we use are very direct measurements of world‐friendly or world‐unfriendly behavior (such as signing of international treaties, pollution, acts of terrorism, wars, etc.) and some are rather indirect (such as Nobel prizes, exports of scientific journals, etc.), but they add up to a pretty good picture of whether each country is basically a net creditor to the rest of humanity in each of the seven categories, or whether it’s a free‐rider on the global system and ought to be recognized as such.
This is surely a very incomplete picture of the world. You can’t possibly reduce a country’s entire contribution to humanity and the planet down to 35 indicators.
Correct. But it’s a start, and we welcome constructive contributions. It willprobably never be possible to give a complete answer on any of these issues, but it’s surely better to get the debate going than to keep silent.
Why do some countries rank unexpectedly high in certain categories?
The Good Country Index is different from other country rankings, because it looks at the external impact of countries, not their domestic performance. This often produces a different picture of the world than the one we’re used to seeing: an unfamiliar, but revealing picture.
You can see this clearly in the “Science & Technology” and “Culture” categories, where we often find countries not normally associated with these fields ranking very high. But we’re not attempting to assess how advanced countries are technologically, or how powerful or ancient their cultures are: we are simply measuring how active and effective they are in sharing the scientific, technological and cultural assets they have with populations around the world.
For example, Belgium often ranks very high in the ‘Culture’ ranking: this doesn’t imply that Belgium has “more culture” than, for example, Greece, Mexico or China: it means that, relative to its size, Belgium works harder at sharing its cultural activities and outputs with the international community - as far as it’s possible to measure these things with the available data.
Similarly, the United States is of course among the world’s most advanced countries in terms of the quantity, quality and importance of its scientific and technological activity, but it doesn’t rank at the top of this category because there are a number of other countries which, in proportion to the size of their economies, do a better job of sharing what technology and scientific knowledge they do produce. (Note that we don’t count commercial exports of scientific and technological goods in the ranking because as far as possible we try to keep this a measurement of countries, not companies).
It’s not fair to penalize poor countries by ranking them low in the Good Country Index: they would give more to the world if they had the money, time, skills, education, peace, health, etc.
For most indicators, each country’s score in the Good Country Index is divided by its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) so that smaller and poorer countries aren’t unduly penalized in the ranking for their limited ability to ‘make a difference’ in the world. Having said this, the Good Country Index isn’t passing any kind of judgment on countries, nor is it commenting on the reasons behind any country’s scores. It is certainly true that countries which need to focus on severe domestic challenges tend to be more concerned about their own populations and their own stability than those of other countries. Maybe this is right, and maybe it’s not: one for further discussion.
Did you try other normalizations such as GNI or per capita?
Yes. As it happens, the ranking is not hugely sensitive to different normalizations. A per capita normalization is equally legitimate but it does tend to punish impoverished countries, which is something we wanted to avoid.
You’ve included several territories in the list which aren’t sovereign states. Why is this?
We include any territory that reports enough accurate data for it to be ranked in the Good Country Index. No judgment is implied about the sovereign status, or otherwise, of any territory included in the list: these are all places that behave like countries to the extent of measuring and reporting their behavior to the United Nations and other international agencies as if they were countries, and that’s good enough for us.
You’ve left out a number of territories/nations. Why is this?
Territories are included or excluded from the Index purely on the basis of the available data. Countries with missing data on more than 2 out of 5 indicators on any category are generally excluded, except in a handful of cases where there are very few missing values overall.
In total, 169 countries are included in this year’s Index. Since the rankings are based on mean scores per category and missing values are ignored, the countries included in the Index are neither rewarded nor punished for any non‐reporting.
What year does the Good Country Index refer to?
Because the data in the 35 indicators which make up the Good Country Index are collected in different forms and at different times for different reasons, it’s impossible to focus the Index on any single year—some indicators report on things which have happened during the previous year, a few of them are constantly updated, and some of them relate to behaviors which may have taken place up to a decade earlier. For this reason, we’ve used mostly 2020 data for the current edition of the Good Country Index. It’s as close as the available data allows to a complete portrait of the world today.
What about the recent scandal/invasion/attack/war/policy/election in country x? Should they be at the bottom of the Good Country Index because of that?
The Good Country Index doesn’t react to specific events because there’s usually no objective way of measuring their immediate impact on the world. Many behaviors—such as wars, for example—will, in time, be reflected in the data sources that the Good Country Index is based on (for example, the UCDP‐PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset in the case of wars) and so they will be accounted for in future updates. But as yet we have no reliable mechanism for reacting to one‐off episodes. We’re working on this, and suggestions are gratefully received.
This isn’t fair. You’re blaming entire countries for something their government is responsible for, and rewarding governments for things their population have done without state help.
The Good Country Index doesn’t attempt to distinguish between different actors in each country, which in many cases would be impossible anyway. We treat each country as a whole and simply measure what, as a whole, its impact is on the world. Others are welcome to debate how the praise or blame should be apportioned to government, civil society, individuals or companies.
This is culturally biased. The values you’ve chosen as ‘good for humanity / good for the planet’ are based on a liberal, Western, capitalist view of the world.
They try to be as universal as possible. This isn’t rocket‐science: in the end it’s pretty obvious that starting wars or polluting the atmosphere is doing no favors to the world, and most people from most cultural backgrounds would agree with that. And we aren’t proposing any complete or definitive answer to what constitutes a Good Country: this index hopes to be the beginning of a global debate which might one day lead to such an understanding.
I’m surprised to see countries like Egypt and Nigeria among the best performers in the peace and security category. Why is this?
On the whole, the countries that score well in this category do not export arms; they are not directly involved in international violent conflicts (except in some cases as peacekeepers); they tend to have tight cyber‐security, and may contribute significantly to UN peacekeeping missions with troops and/or funds. Of course, several of them have a great deal to worry about at home, including violent conflicts within their own borders, and their contribution to international peace and security is often a largely passive one: they do very little harm overseas, rather than doing a lot of good. Still, the net effect is positive and this is what earns them their high ranking in this particular category—even if, in many cases, their overall contribution to the common good is let down by lower scores in other categories.
Final Words
It’s important to emphasize again that the Good Country Index only measures theinternational impacts of countries; what they do at home is well documented in many other studies and surveys. The fact that domestic behavior isn’t included in the Good Country Index of course doesn’t mean we excuse, condone, minimize or overlook it in any way: it’s simply not the thing that we’re measuring.
Remember that when we talk about a ‘good country’ we’re not attempting to judge its overall moral standing: we’re measuring its impact on the rest of the world, its contribution to the common good. You can’t get a complete picture of any country without considering both domestic and international factors, and we would always encourage people to consider the Good Country Index scores alongside some reliable measures of domestic behavior.
Read the new edition of the Good Country Index for free here and review the data here.
