What do you mean, ​“good”?

Try thinking of “good” as a measure of how much a country contributes to the common good. So in this context “good” means the opposite of “selfish”, not the opposite of “bad”. The Good Country Index isn’t trying to make any moral judgments: it just measures, as objectively as possible, what each country contributes to the common good, and what it takes away, relative to its size.

For this reason, the Good Country Index does not include any purely domestic measurements, such as poverty, inequality, quality of life, corruption or human rights within the country's own borders. Of course these things are important, but reliable data on such matters is pretty easy to find: it's what most other country rankings measure and there's simply no point in the Good Country Index duplicating their efforts.

What the Good Country Index is trying to measure is something different, something unique, and something critically important in our interconnected, interdependent world: how much each country contributes to the world outside its own borders.

It's essential always to compare the GCI rankings alongside a reputable measurement of domestic progress, such as the UN's Human Development Index, or the Social Progress Index. That way, you can start to get a true and complete picture of where each country stands.