Vote With Your Feet - calculations

We calculate 10 factors each with a maximum value of 100. To make higher numbers always better, some of the raw inputs from the CIA data are flipped. For example, we use their "inflation" measure to compute a "currency stability" rating where higher is better.

Each of the factors is scaled so that it is usually from 0 to 100, though sometimes negative for really bad places. Then make an overall goodness based on a weighted average of these. So the overall ratings also have a max of 100.

In our weighted average, the two most important things are that the government is spending a small fraction of the GDP and that people are moving to the country. The rest are of lesser importance but equal to each other.

We parse the CIA web page data, filling in some unknowns with default values, to get a file with raw cia data. Then convert this raw data with a perl program to get a a file with our factors and ratings and then sort this with a unix sort and convert it a web page with another program.

Known Problems

There is no data for crime rates or deaths due to wars in the CIA World Fact Book. I imagine that it is hard to get good data, but any data would help. This seems like a very important factor in rating a country. If anyone has any leads on how to get this type of data I would really love to know. Send email to vince at offshore.ai (replace at with @).

Some countries have huge waiting lists of people that want to get in. It is an indication that people like that country, more than the number of immigrants alone shows. But I have no data on such waiting lists and so can not use them here.

Sometimes there is no data for certain things. In these cases I try to use an average for that item so that it does not alter the overall standing for that country as much as if it were 0. But still the results can be significantly off. In most countries where we did not have government expenditures as a fraction of the GDP I guessed 50% of the economey, except in tax-havens where I guessed 25% (like Jersey and Guernsey).

The "expenditures" in the CIA data is only for expenditures at the federal level. For the USA, Canada, and France this is far less than the total government expenditures. These 3 have been hard wired to 50% of GDP - which seems closer to accurate for the counntry as a whole. Other large countries may have the same problem, but have not been fixed in any way.

The "Debt-external" is not the total government debt. So a country like the US where most of the government debt is to people inside the US, the total Debt looks smaller than it really is. Would rather have a total government debt number.

The definition of "literacy" is different for different countries. So the numbers are not really comparable.