How did you choose the indicators?

Although more and more reliable data about countries is collected every year, it’s still patchy. So we have to be pretty clever about using the good, robust, available data as ‘tokens’ for the qualities we’re looking for. Most of the indicators we use are very direct measurements of world-friendly or world-unfriendly behaviour (such as signing of international treaties, pollution, acts of terrorism, wars, etc) and some are rather indirect (such as Nobel prizes, exports of scientific journals, etc), but they add up to a pretty good picture of whether each country is basically a net creditor to the rest of humanity in each of the seven categories, or whether it’s a free-rider on the global system and ought to be recognised as such.