Independent rankings, built from public data

Nations Inquiry is a reference site about countries. It answers one question in many forms: where does a country stand, on a given measure, against the others measured alongside it? The measures are the statistics that international agencies and research institutes publish every year — life expectancy, corruption perceptions, school completion, the share of electricity from renewables, and well over a hundred more. The site gathers them in one place, keeps them exactly as their publishers released them, and puts them beside each other country by country, subject by subject and region by region.

From a chosen few of those statistics it also builds the Country Index, a yearly ranking that gives each country a position rather than a score. Its method, its inputs and its limits are published in full, because a ranking that cannot be checked is an opinion with numbers on it.

The site began as a set of infographics. It became a data site in the summer of 2026, when the numbers behind the charts were freed into tables and the tables grew into everything else. The charts are still here, under Charts & analysis, and they now stand on the same data as the rest.

Everything on the site is reachable from five doors, and each door is the same data cut a different way.

• The Country Index — every placed country in one table, first to last, with the subjects it stands well and badly on. One edition a year, never changed after publication.
• Countries — a profile for each nation: a photograph of a place in it, its key numbers, how its ranks have moved, and every statistic held for it, each linked to the body that published it.
• Topics — twelve subjects, from Governance & Institutions to Education & Knowledge. Each page ranks the world on that subject alone and shows which countries tell a different story on it than they do overall.
• Regions — the continents and the UN’s sub-regions, each ranking its own members and placed among its peers by the middle of them.
• Statistics and Datasets — every measure charted across its editions, and every edition as a sortable table, exactly as published.

A few rules decide almost everything about how this site is built. They are written down at length on the Methodology page; here they are in a sentence each.

1. Store what the publisher published, digit for digit. Nothing is rounded, smoothed or estimated on the way in. Precision is trimmed only when a number is drawn on screen, where it can be restored.
2. Read from the producer, not from a copy. Where a statistic is available from the organisation that made it and from a platform that redistributes it, the site reads the producer’s release, because copies sometimes round.
3. A publisher’s rank is a rank; ours is a position. When a publisher ranks countries, that rank is shown as published. When the site orders a statistic itself, the result is labelled derived, and it is never confused with the publisher’s.
4. Positions, never scores. The Country Index publishes where a country places and how many countries it is placed among. The arithmetic that orders them is never printed, because a number out of 100 with nothing behind it would read like a measurement nobody made.
5. Licence first. A statistic appears only when its publisher’s own terms allow it to be republished, commercially, with credit. Every dataset page names the licence and the date it was checked.
6. Say what a number cannot say. Every position is printed with its field, every standing with its coverage, and every method with its known weaknesses.

Nations Inquiry is an independent publication, run by a small team and built in the open. It is not affiliated with, funded by or endorsed by any of the organisations whose data it publishes, and none of them produced or approved its rankings. Where a publisher’s own rank appears, it is credited to the publisher; everything derived from the data is credited to this site, so a reader always knows whose number they are looking at.

The site is written and maintained by people, with the help of software for the parts a person should not do by hand: fetching a publisher’s release, checking it row by row against another route, and rebuilding a few thousand pages when a dataset changes. The decisions — which statistic to admit, what a word means, where a picture would take a side — are made by the people, and written down.

The site’s publishers are listed, with their licences, on the Sources & publishers page. Its record of changes is on Updates, and its record of mistakes on Corrections.

It is not a measurement of anything. Every number here was measured by somebody else; the site’s own contribution is the ordering, and the ordering is relative — a country’s standing can move because other countries moved, or because a publisher measured more of them.

It is not a judgement on a nation or its people. A standing is a place in one list, in one year, on the statistics its publishers chose to measure. It is printed with the field it belongs to and the sources it rests on so that it is read as exactly that and no more.

And it is not advice. Nothing on the site tells you where to invest, move, travel or send your children to school. It tells you what was measured, by whom, and where each country came out.

Tell us when something is wrong. A figure that does not match its publisher, a country filed under the wrong region, a page that is hard to use with a screen reader — each is fixed and recorded on the Corrections page, and the person who reported it is thanked there if they wish.

Tell us what is missing. If a statistic you rely on is not here, say which and who publishes it. The first thing we check is the licence; the second is whether the producer publishes it at full precision. Both take minutes when the report is named.

And cite the site when you use it. The Press & citation page has the exact wording; the Terms of use say what may be reused and how. Write to contact@nationsinquiry.com or use the contact page; a person reads every message.