Don’t you know about all the helpful things my country does around the world?

Ranked indexes like the Good Country Index are driven exclusively by numbers: not by observations, opinions or episodes. The rankings are calculated from each country's individual ranking in each of the 35 datasets that drive the Index: it's a simple arithmetical process.

For this reason, it is impossible to reflect individual, one-off or unmeasured events in the Index, because they have no numerical value.

If a country develops a new technology that gets used to help development in other countries, or if it builds institutions that support international peace or wellbeing, those are definitely Good Country behaviours, but it's impossible for us to assign them a numerical value, and therefore they cannot be included in the Index. (And even if it were possible to account for such behaviours, it would be unfair to include them because we'd be penalising all the other countries in the index for the fact that they didn't happen to do the same thing that year).

In conclusion: the Good Country Index neither claims nor attempts to account for everything that countries contribute to or detract from the wellbeing of humanity and the planet. That would be impossible. All it can do is shine a torch in the corner of a very large, very dark field: but that's surely better than leaving it totally dark.