Why 41 countries could not be ranked in the 2026 Country Index

The 2026 Country Index places 183 countries. Forty-one others appear on the edition page under a heading of their own, not ranked, and this piece is about them: the rule that excludes them, how close each came, and what the data would need to hold for them to be placed. The figures are as the edition stood on 25 October 2026.

The rule

Sixteen subjects vote in the 2026 edition. A country is placed in the overall index when it holds a standing on 12 of them — three quarters, rounded. A standing on a subject, in turn, needs published readings on at least half of that subject's keys: two of four, or two of three. The bar is there for a reason the methodology states plainly: a standing built from one reading, printed beside one built from four, is two different things sharing a column heading. So a country with too few readings is not placed low; it is not placed.

Nothing about the rule is a judgement on the country. The 41 are listed on the edition page in groups, by how far short they fell, and in alphabetical order inside each group — ordering them any other way would imply a ranking among the unranked, which is exactly what the rule refuses to make.

Thirteen countries held most of what they needed

Thirteen countries hold standings on between six and ten subjects. Three of them are two subjects short: Dominica, North Korea and Saint Kitts and Nevis each hold 10 of the 12 required. Micronesia and Nauru hold 9; Andorra, Kosovo, the Marshall Islands and Taiwan hold 8; Palau and Tuvalu 7; Liechtenstein and Monaco 6.

These are the countries a future edition is most likely to place, and the reasons they are short differ. North Korea is measured by the agencies that estimate from outside — population, mortality, food supply — and not by the surveys and indices that need access, so it holds standings where estimation reaches and none where fieldwork is needed. The small island states of the Caribbean and the Pacific are the opposite case: open, but too small for many publishers' tables, which often start at a population floor or stop at the countries a survey could afford to visit. Taiwan and Kosovo are absent from the tables of publishers whose membership does not include them, whatever those publishers measure.

Twenty-four held five subjects or fewer

The largest group holds standings on between one and five subjects. Most are territories rather than states: American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands; Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat and the Turks and Caicos Islands; Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten; French Polynesia and New Caledonia; Greenland, the Channel Islands, the Cook Islands and Niue. Three are states or state-like: Macau, San Marino and Somaliland.

A territory appears in a publisher's table when the publisher counts economies rather than members — the World Bank's and the ILO's series do, which is where most of these standings come from — and disappears from every table that counts UN member states. Macau, Puerto Rico and San Marino, each with five standings, are the furthest along; most of the rest hold two or three.

Four held none

The Faroe Islands, the Isle of Man, Saint Martin and Vatican City hold a standing on no subject at all: on no voting subject do they have readings on half of the keys. They are listed because the site holds at least one statistic for each of them, and a list that silently dropped them would be a list that could not be checked.

What would change it

The bar does not move to admit a country — the methodology is explicit that widening the data window or lowering the floor to fill a thin field is not done. What moves is the data. A subject that gains a key with wide coverage, or a key that gains the small states, places countries that were one standing short without changing anything about the rule. The thirteen in the first group are the ones to watch: each needs between two and six more subject standings, and several of those subjects are one key away.

In the meantime every one of the 41 has a profile, and every subject standing it does hold is published there, with its field — a place among all countries measured on that subject, exactly as it would be printed for a ranked country.