Analysis
What the 2026 Country Index shows
Switzerland is placed first of 183 countries, alone, with the four Nordic countries behind it. Europe’s middle country is 26th; Africa’s is 148th. Sixteen subjects vote, 61 published statistics decide them, and 41 countries could not be placed at all.
- Published
Share
The figures in this piece are as they stood on . The pages it is based on are kept current; this piece is not, so a number here may since have moved on those pages.
Based on: Country Index 2026 · How the index is built · Standings by region
The 2026 edition of the Country Index places 183 countries, and declines to place 41 more. This piece reads the edition as a whole: who stands where, what the middle looks like on each continent, and what the standing is and is not. Every figure is as the edition stood on 25 October 2026; the index page itself is the record.
The shape of the edition
Sixteen subjects vote in 2026, from Risk & Resilience to Health & Wellbeing. Two more — Money & Public Finance, and People & Population — are published as dashboards and do not vote, because no statistic in them cleared the admission tests that year. Sixty-one published statistics are the keys: between three and four per subject, each read at one edition, each from a named publisher — the World Bank, the FAO, the ILO, V-Dem, UNESCO, UN DESA, the Global Carbon Project and others. The readings the keys describe run from 2013 to 2025, the older ones only because some keys are latest-available compilations in which each country carries its own survey year.
To be placed at all, a country needs a standing on 12 of the 16 voting subjects, and a standing on a subject needs readings on at least half of its keys. One hundred and eighty-three countries clear that bar; the 41 that do not are listed, grouped by how far short they fell, on the edition page, and are the subject of a piece of their own.
Who leads
Switzerland is placed first, alone. Its standings are 4th of 182 on Work & Labour, 6th of 194 on Governance & Institutions, 8th of 196 on Development & Human Capital and 9th of 198 on Education & Knowledge — and 71st of 186 on Environment & Sustainability, the one subject on which it sits outside the first hundred. It holds standings on 15 of the 16 subjects, missing only Energy. The edition also publishes a range for every row — the span its place would move within if any single key were dropped — and Switzerland's is 1 to 2: there is no key whose removal would move it lower than second.
Behind it come the four Nordic countries in a block: Denmark 2nd, Norway 3rd, Finland 4th and Sweden 5th, each placed on all 16 subjects from 59 of the 61 keys. Austria and Luxembourg share 6th place; Germany is 8th, the Netherlands 9th and Czechia 10th. All ten are European. The highest-placed country outside Europe is South Korea, 13th.
The middle, continent by continent
The middle country of the whole field is 91st. By continent the middles sit far apart, and the figures below are medians of the countries placed — an unweighted middle country, not a population-weighted average, and never a continent's rank.
| Continent | Placed | Middle country's place | Highest | Lowest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Europe | 39 | 26th | Switzerland, 1st | Russia, 73rd |
| Americas | 33 | 81st | Canada, 24th | Haiti, 173rd |
| Asia | 48 | 91st | South Korea, 13th | Yemen, 181st |
| Oceania | 9 | 97th | Australia, 17th | Papua New Guinea, 144th |
| Africa | 54 | 148th | Mauritius, 45th | South Sudan, 183rd |
Two things in the table are worth more than the ordering. Europe's lowest-placed country, Russia at 73rd, sits above the middle country of every other continent. And Africa, with 54 countries placed — the most of any continent — has its middle country at 148th, which means that half of the African countries the index can place are in the last 36 places of the whole field. Mauritius, Africa's highest at 45th, is placed below 30 European countries.
The last places
The five lowest places are held by countries in or just out of war: Sudan 179th, Chad 180th, Yemen 181st, Somalia 182nd and South Sudan 183rd. Four of the five hold standings on 15 of the 16 subjects — they are not placed low for lack of data, but on it. South Sudan holds 13. Each is, on at least one subject, far from its overall place: South Sudan is 9th of 186 on Environment & Sustainability, because the keys there — CO₂ per person, ecological footprint, water stress — read well for a country that consumes very little. That inversion has a piece of its own.
What a standing is, and is not
A standing on this site is a place in an ordering this site made: each key's published value becomes a place within that key's own field, the places are averaged, and the countries are put in order by that average. The average itself is never published, because it is this site's arithmetic with nothing anchoring it, and a printed number invites being read as a measurement somebody made. What is published is the place, the size of the field it is a place in, the range, and every key it was built from — all of which can be checked against the tables on the edition page.
It is also still moving. The 2026 edition is not yet final: when a statistic is added or a publisher revises its figures, the edition is rebuilt and places can shift — on 14 October one revision moved 52 countries. This piece reads the edition as it stood on 25 October 2026; the edition page always shows where it stands now. Once the 2026 edition is closed, it will not change again, and the next one will be a new page at its own address. The edition is published under CC BY-SA 4.0, because some of its key inputs are ShareAlike and a derived ranking carries the licence of what it is derived from.