About the site
The words, defined once
A statistics site lives or dies on a few words meaning exactly one thing each. These are the ones this site uses carefully, grouped by what they describe. Each has its own address, so a definition can be linked to from anywhere.
- Last reviewed
- Questions
- contact@nationsinquiry.com
The three that matter most
- Rank
A number a publisher printed.
- Position · derived
One published statistic, put in order by this site.
- Standing
A place in the Country Index or in one of its topics, worked out by this site from several statistics together, and always named with its edition.
Never “score”, never “official”, never “absolute” — see the Methodology.
Three words that are not interchangeable
Every place a country is given on this site is one of these three things, and the word says which.
- Rank
- A number a publisher printed. When the World Bank, UNDP or Transparency International ranks the countries in its own report, that rank is shown here exactly as published, with the publisher named beside it. This site never alters a rank, and it never calls anything else one.See Datasets.
- Position · derived
- One published statistic, put in order by this site. Some publishers measure every country but rank nobody. Where the statistic has a clear better end and few ties, the site orders the published values itself and calls the result a position, always with the word derived beside it so nobody mistakes it for the publisher's own rank. It never appears on a country profile, which promises that every rank there is the publisher's.See Ranks, positions and standings.
- Standing
- A place in the Country Index or in one of its topics, worked out by this site from several statistics together, and always named with its edition. A standing is relative: it says where a country places against the others measured on the same statistics, in that year, under that method. It is never a score.See The Country Index.
- Score (a word this site does not use for its own results)
- A publisher's score, such as the Human Development Index value or the Corruption Perceptions Index score, is a measurement that publisher made and is shown here with the publisher's unit. This site publishes no score of its own. The average that orders the Country Index exists only to produce positions and is never printed, because a number out of 100 with nothing anchoring it would read like a measurement nobody made.
Reading a position
The words printed next to a number, and what each one adds.
- Field
- The set of countries a position is a position among. A position is always printed with its field — 12th of 174 — because 12th of 44 and 12th of 215 are not the same showing, and the field is what makes the number checkable.
- Joint
- Two or more countries that cannot honestly be separated. Publishers' ranks are shown as published, ties included. Positions and standings are printed as joint when the values behind them are equal at the precision the site uses, rather than being split by digits that carry no information.
- Range
- Where a country's standing in the Country Index would fall if any one of its key statistics were left out. A bare position claims more precision than a ranking built from a few dozen inputs has; the range says how much of that position is solid. A wide range means the standing rests on fewer readings than it looks.See How a standing is made.
- Coverage
- How much of the method's input a country actually has: standings on how many of the topics, and readings on how many of the key statistics. A country below the coverage floor is listed as unplaced, with the count that excluded it, rather than being placed on a guess.
- Band
- One of five words — top fifth, upper middle, middle, lower middle, bottom fifth — read off a position within its field. Bands appear on a country's own statistics and on the topic and region pages, where they help a reader scan. They are not printed in the Country Index table, where the position already says it.
- Better end
- The direction in which a statistic improves. Life expectancy is better high, child mortality is better low, and a gender ratio is best at exactly one. Some statistics — the share of the economy that is manufacturing, say — have no better end at all, and the site refuses to derive a position from those or to colour them good or bad.
Editions and time
A report's year and the year its numbers describe are rarely the same, so the site keeps both.
- Edition
- One release of one statistic, named for the year the publisher put on it: the Human Development Report 2025, the Corruption Perceptions Index 2024. Each edition is a separate table on this site. The Country Index also comes in editions, one a year, and a published edition is never changed afterwards.
- Data year
- The year an edition's figures actually describe, which is often a year or two before the year on its cover. The Country Index chooses each of its inputs by data year, not edition year, and prints the span of data years its inputs cover rather than pretending to a single tidy one.
- Window
- The span of data years the Country Index will accept for an edition. An input describing a year older than the window is left out of that edition rather than being passed off as current, and the page says so.
- Restated series
- A publisher's own recalculation of its past years on its current method, released as one file. The Human Development Index is one: its 2025 report restates every year since 1990. Such a series is comparable end to end, but its earlier years are not what the earlier reports printed at the time, and the dataset page says which kind it is.
How the Country Index is put together
The parts of the method that have a name.
- Topic
- One of the twelve subjects every statistic on the site is filed under, such as Health & Wellbeing or Governance & Institutions. In the Country Index each topic casts one vote, however many statistics sit beneath it, which is what stops the ranking tilting toward whichever subject has the most data.See Topics.
- Key statistic
- One of the few statistics in each topic that actually decides a standing. Every other statistic is context: charted, linked and downloadable, but without a vote. A key has to pass seven tests in every edition, and one that fails is demoted to context for that year with the reason printed.See The seven tests.
- Coverage floor
- The least a country must hold before it is given a standing: half of a topic's keys, rounded up and never fewer than two, for a topic standing; and standings on three quarters of the voting topics for a place in the Country Index. Countries below a floor are listed with the count that excluded them.
- Silent topic
- A topic that could not vote in an edition because it did not have at least two admitted key statistics. It is still published, as a dashboard of its statistics, with the reason it fell silent printed at the top.
Sources and licences
Every number here belongs to somebody, and these are the words for saying who and on what terms.
- Publisher
- The organisation whose statistic it is: the body that produced the number, not a website that passed it on. When a statistic is available from both its producer and a redistributor, the site reads it from the producer, because redistributors sometimes round on the way.See Sources & publishers.
- Redistributor
- A platform that republishes other organisations' statistics — the World Bank's general data API carries UNICEF's, the FAO's and the ILO's series, for example. Convenient, and sometimes rounded: the site checks each series against its producer's own release before trusting a redistributed copy.
- Licence
- The terms under which a publisher lets others reuse its data. This site publishes a statistic only when its publisher's licence permits reuse, including commercial reuse, with credit. The licence and the date it was last checked are printed on every dataset page.See Terms of use.
- CC BY
- Creative Commons Attribution, the most common licence on this site. It allows copying, sharing and adapting the data for any purpose as long as the publisher is credited. The IGO variant is the same licence as adopted by intergovernmental organisations such as UN agencies.
- Derivative work
- Something made by reshaping someone else's work — a ranking built from a publisher's numbers, for instance. A statistic whose licence forbids derivative works may be shown but can never be a key statistic, because a ranking is exactly the thing it forbids.
Geography
How the map is divided, and whose lines it follows.
- Region
- A continent or a sub-region as defined by the United Nations' M49 standard, which is the grouping the publishers themselves mostly use. A region's page ranks its members, and its own place among regions is the median of its members' positions — printed as a place, never as a rank.See Regions.
- Border, de facto
- The line where one administration ends and another begins on the ground, which is how the maps on this site are drawn, from Natural Earth. A line on these maps describes who administers what; it takes no side on who should.
- Country
- An entity with an ISO 3166-1 code that at least one publisher measures, plus three the standard does not cover — Kosovo, Northern Cyprus and Somaliland — which appear because publishers measure them, under codes the site marks as conventions rather than standards. Being listed is a statement about data, not about recognition.See Countries A–Z.