Skip to content
Nations Inquiry — home

Country Index 2026

Where does your country stand?

Nations Inquiry visualizes global data and country rankings to highlight strengths, challenges, and progress to drive informed global change.

Or jump toUnited StatesChinaIndiaUnited KingdomGermanyFranceSaudi Arabiaall countries A–Z

01Country Index 2026

The top ten countries

178 countries placed on 16 topics, each topic carrying exactly one vote. Choose a continent to see its highest-placed countries. A position here is this site’s own — never a publisher’s rank.

Full ranking

The top 10 of 178 countries placed.

  1. 1

    Switzerland

    of 178 countries placed · Western Europe

    Strongest: Governance & Institutions, 6th of 194
    16 of 16 topics with a standing

  2. 2

    Denmark

    of 178 countries placed · Northern Europe

    Strongest: Governance & Institutions, 1st of 194
    16 of 16 topics with a standing

  3. 3

    Iceland

    of 178 countries placed · Northern Europe

    Strongest: Peace & Security, 1st of 177
    15 of 16 topics with a standing

  1. 4Norway
  2. 5Sweden
  3. 6Finland
  4. 7Austriajoint
  5. 7Luxembourgjoint
  6. 9Ireland
  7. 10Netherlands

02Every placed country

The Country Index 2026 on a map

Darker is placed higher. Hover a country for its position, or select it to open its profile. Below the map, each continent and its sub-regions.

All regions
1st178thNot placed · 46 countries with too few statisticsNo data

03The subjects

Standings in 18 topics

A standing is never one number with a mystery inside it. These are the topics it is built from — each with the statistics that decide it, and the country currently placed first.

All topics

04The world in records

Who holds the record

One country at the extreme of each statistic, read from its newest edition. Where countries tie at the top, no record is named.

All statistics

05Latest editions

Who rose and fell in the published ranks

The biggest moves between each report’s two newest editions, in the publisher’s own ranks. A report whose field of countries changed by more than 5% is left out, because its ranks would no longer be comparable.

Ranks as published by Transparency International in the Corruption Perceptions Index: the 2024 edition (180 countries ranked) → the 2025 edition (182 ranked).

Improved most

rank before → after
  1. Azerbaijan154 → 130+24
  2. Sri Lanka121 → 107+14
  3. El Salvador130 → 120+10

Declined most

rank before → after
  1. Eswatini135 → 153−18
  2. Niger107 → 124−17
  3. Türkiye107 → 124−17
Every country in the Corruption Perceptions Index

06Analysis

Latest charts and analysis

All charts

More analysis

  1. China Leads Global High-Technology Exports

  2. Global Hunger Index 2025: Countries with the Most Alarming Hunger Crisis

  3. WJP Rule of Law Index 2024: Which Countries Lead in Justice and Accountability?

07Fresh from the source

Statistics imported most recently

Newest first. The date is the day the numbers were read from the publisher — a re-import moves a statistic up this list even when its figures did not change.

Every dataset and edition
The most recently imported statistics, newest first
ImportedStatisticEdition
Academic Freedom Index2025
Asylum-Seekers by Country of Asylum2025
Average Time to Clear Exports Through Customs2025
Central Bank Independence Index2023
Climate Readiness (ND-GAIN)2024
Climate Vulnerability (ND-GAIN)2024

08Method

How the Country Index is built

What a position means, where the numbers come from, and the questions readers ask most.

  1. Collect

    55 key statistics from 24 publishers, each stored exactly as it was released.

  2. Compare within each field

    A country’s reading on each statistic becomes its place among the countries that statistic covers — between 120 and 222 of them — so being measured in a smaller field is no advantage.

  3. One vote per topic

    The statistics are grouped into 16 topics, and each topic has exactly one vote. The 178 countries with standings on at least 12 topics are given a position.

Statistics behind the 2026 edition come from

Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC) · CIVICUS · Ember · European Commission Joint Research Centre, with the Inter-Agency Standing Committee · Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) · Global Carbon Project · Global Footprint Network · Growth Lab at Harvard University · Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV), Ruhr University Bochum · International Labour Organization (ILO) · Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN), University of Notre Dame · OECD · Oxford Insights · Transparency International · UN DESA Population Division · UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) · UN Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group (MMEIG) · UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) · UNDP Human Development Report Office · UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) · UNICEF, WHO and World Bank Group (Joint Malnutrition Estimates) · V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg · World Bank Group · World Energy Council

The full method, every key and every exclusion

Questions readers ask

Whose ranking is this?

The Country Index is Nations Inquiry’s own. It is built from 55 key statistics published by 24 organisations — United Nations agencies, the World Bank and independent research institutes — but none of them produced this ranking or endorses it. Where a publisher prints its own rank for a statistic, that rank is shown separately and credited to the publisher.

How the Country Index is built
Why isn’t my country placed?

A country needs a standing on at least 12 of the 16 topics to be given a position, so that no position rests on a handful of readings. 46 countries have some data but fall short of that. They are listed on the full ranking with how many topics they reach, rather than being placed on a guess, and each still has a profile with every statistic we hold for it.

See the full Country Index 2026
Where do the numbers come from?

From the organisations that publish them. Each statistic is read from its publisher’s own release and stored exactly as published — nothing is rounded on the way in. The 2026 edition uses, for each source, the edition describing 2013–2025. Every table on the site can be traced to its publisher’s release, with the edition, the licence and the date it was imported.

Browse every statistic
Why positions and not scores?

Because a score would claim more than the method knows. The Index combines very different measures, and any single number built from them would read like a measurement nobody actually took. A position with its field — “12th of 178” — states exactly what is known: where a country stands relative to the others.

How often is it updated?

The Country Index is published once a year and named for the year of publication; an edition is kept unchanged once a newer one replaces it. The statistics underneath are updated whenever their publishers release a new edition, and the date each edition was imported is shown with its data.

Can I reuse the data?

Yes. The Country Index 2026 is published under CC BY-SA 4.0. Some key inputs are ShareAlike, so this derived ranking carries the same licence. Each underlying statistic keeps its publisher’s own licence, which is shown with its data.

CC BY-SA 4.0

New editions, as they are published

One email when a new index edition, dataset or analysis goes up. No more than that.

Feedback

Feedback

How are we doing?

Two answers are required — a rating and your email. The rest is up to you.