CTI Score
27 — Chad / Haiti
255075
91 — Nordic / micro-states
No data
GDP tells you what a country earns. It doesn't tell you what its people do when no one is looking. In Japan, someone who finds a wallet stuffed with cash will almost certainly hand it in to the nearest police box. In Mexico, they almost certainly won't.
That gap — between what income figures show and what daily life actually feels like — is what this index tracks. Not whether governments are competent. Whether the street outside is clean. Whether you need to bribe someone to register a car. Whether strangers can be trusted.
Thirteen data sources. Six percent of the weight goes on how institutions look from the outside. The other ninety-four is what happens at street level.
Most country rankings of this kind — the World Bank's governance indicators, Transparency International's corruption index, the World Justice Project — ask experts to grade a nation's institutions. That tells you what a country's elite has managed to build. It tells you very little about whether the man at the licence counter expects a bribe.
This index starts from the other end. Its two heaviest components are the Wallet Return Rate and Gallup's Law & Order score, because they record what people meet in ordinary life: whether a stranger returns your lost property, whether you feel safe walking home at night, whether routine paperwork costs an envelope of cash.
Hard outcomes set the floor — murder, road deaths, terrorism, the state of the streets. A country where these have gone badly wrong cannot be high-trust, whatever its citizens tell pollsters. The expert measures of institutional quality are still here, but they are held to six percent of the total. The other ninety-four percent is behaviour.
The thirteen components arrive in wildly different units: dollars, percentages, deaths per hundred thousand, scores on a five-point scale. Before they can be added together, each is rescaled to run from 0 to 100. Otherwise a single large number would quietly swamp the rest. That rescaling is what "normalisation" means.
The two World Bank governance scores run from −2.5 to +2.5 and are stretched evenly onto the 0–100 scale.
Murder, road deaths and terrorism have long tails — a few catastrophic countries that would otherwise squash everyone else into a narrow band. These are placed on a logarithmic scale, so the differences among ordinary countries stay visible.
The shadow economy is converted from its share of GDP, with a floor at 5%, since no economy is entirely above board.
Infrastructure is judged against expectation. Each country's logistics score is set beside what a country of its income would normally manage. A rich country with shabby infrastructure lands below the midpoint; a poorer one that has built unusually well lands above it. This separates real civic investment from the simple fact of being wealthy. It replaces an older competitiveness survey that was discontinued in 2019.
The survey-based measures — Gallup, the World Values Survey, Legatum, the waste index, the bribery rate — already come on comparable scales, so they are used as they are.
Nobody counts anything here. The World Bank does not run a corruption survey; it gathers other people's — business risk ratings, expert panels, household polls like the Gallup World Poll — rescales them onto one axis and blends them with a statistical model. The result estimates how corrupt informed observers believe a country's public sector to be.
That makes it a measure of reputation, and it is the reason this index leans on it so lightly. A country with an aggressive free press exposing scandal can score worse than one where nothing is ever reported.
Built by the same machinery, pointed at a different question: does the state actually function? Whether the civil service is competent, whether policy survives contact with implementation, whether public services turn up when promised.
Also perception, also lightly weighted. A government can be impressively efficient and still preside over a suspicious, atomised society — and the reverse.
The World Bank asks the people who move freight for a living — shipping agents, customs brokers, logistics firms — to rate the ports, roads, railways and digital networks they use in the countries they ship to, on a scale of 1 to 5. It is a verdict from the users, not an audit of the assets.
The index does not use the raw score. It uses the gap between a country's score and what a country of its income normally manages, so that building well counts for more than simply being rich.
All the work that happens off the books — the cash-in-hand builder, the firm hiding half its turnover. By definition it cannot be observed, so economists infer its size from the traces it leaves: more electricity burned than officially productive activity would explain, more cash in circulation than legitimate trade requires.
These are estimates, and the method is disputed. Treat the ordering as sound and the exact percentages as educated guesses. Switzerland and the United States sit near 8% of GDP; Italy 27.6%, Russia 41.8%, Nigeria 55.8%.
Gallup asks people in more than 140 countries whether they feel safe walking alone at night where they live, whether they have confidence in their local police, and whether they personally had money or property stolen — or were assaulted — in the past twelve months. The score combines those answers.
It records what people report living through, not what police forces record, which is why it sidesteps the reporting bias that wrecks most crime statistics. It has its own blind spot: it measures felt safety, so tightly controlled states score well. Tajikistan tops this component at 96, above Switzerland and Norway at 92.
One question, asked in face-to-face interviews across the world for four decades: generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people? The component is simply the share who choose "most people can be trusted".
The spread is enormous and does not track wealth. Denmark 74%, Norway 73%, Sweden 60% — but France 19%, Italy 24%, Brazil 7%. The United States is 37%, below China's 64%. That single number correlates with growth, institutional quality and even life expectancy.
Where trust is an opinion, this is meant to be the behaviour behind it: whether people volunteer, donate, help a stranger, and whether they have friends or family they could rely on in trouble. Legatum assembles survey data on all of it into one score.
This is the thinnest component in the index — only 66 countries carry a value, so for most of the world its weight is redistributed across the others. It also shows the East Asian modesty effect starkly: Japan comes last of all 66 at 43.82, despite low crime and high honesty on every behavioural measure here.
Four economists walked into banks, theatres, museums, post offices and police stations in 355 cities and handed over a wallet they said they had found in the street. More than 17,000 of them. Each held a shopping list, business cards with a working email address, and in most cases a little cash. Then they waited to see who wrote to the owner.
No survey, no self-reporting, no one who knew they were being studied — just what people did with someone else's property. Denmark, Norway and Sweden all returned 82%. The United States returned 57%, China 32%, Mexico 21%.
Transparency International asks ordinary people — not executives, not analysts — whether they personally paid a bribe in the past year when they used a public service: a school, a hospital, an ID or permit office, the utilities, the police, the courts. The bribery-free rate is the share who got through the year without paying.
This is corruption at the counter rather than in the ministry, and it is the sharpest divider in the whole index. Japan and the United Kingdom report 0%; Sweden 1%; Mexico 51%, India 69%, Yemen 77%.
Intentional killings per 100,000 people, compiled by the UN from national police and public-health records. Homicide is the one crime that survives international comparison: bodies get counted, and every country means roughly the same thing by murder. Almost every other crime figure is distorted by what victims bother to report.
The spread is brutal and does not follow income smoothly. Japan 0.23, Singapore 0.2, Norway 0.5 — against the United States at 5.76, Brazil 27, Mexico 28, South Africa 44.
Traffic deaths per 100,000, from the WHO. Many countries do not register road deaths completely, so the WHO models the true figure from the death-registration data that does exist rather than simply reprinting official counts.
It captures three things at once: how the roads are built, how traffic law is enforced, and the unwritten rules drivers actually keep. Norway 1.8 and Japan 2.1 against the United States 12.7 — a gap that is about behaviour and enforcement, not wealth.
Yale's environmental researchers score how much of a country's household rubbish is actually collected and disposed of under control, rather than burned in the open, dumped or left to leak into rivers and sea.
Rubbish is a revealing test because it is rarely about geography and only partly about money. Two equally wealthy countries can treat their shared space completely differently: Denmark 96, Germany 90, Italy 69.
The Institute for Economics & Peace logs terrorist incidents worldwide from its Terrorism Tracker database and scores each country on four things: how many attacks occurred, how many people were killed, how many injured, and how much hostage-taking there was. A five-year weighted average is applied, so a single atrocity does not define a country for a decade.
Most of the world records no terrorism at all: 63 of the 161 countries scored here sit at exactly zero, Singapore and Uruguay among them. Japan is 0.57 and Denmark 0.72, against the United States at 4.52 and Germany 4.45 — and then Nigeria 7.79 and Pakistan 8.57, where political violence has become an ordinary way of settling scores.
A high score means cleaner streets, safer nights, honest dealings and a public realm that is actually looked after. A low score is the daily cost of living without much trust.
Use the sidebar filters to switch components on and off. The map and rankings move with you, so you can look at civic honesty on its own, or see how much a country's place depends on the wallet test.
Hover over any country for its full breakdown: the raw numbers, the rescaled scores, and the source and year behind each one. A one-line summary points to whatever stands out most about it.
Countries measured on fewer than 8 of the 13 components appear dimmed in the rankings. Their scores still count; they simply rest on less evidence.
Because they do well almost everywhere, not just on paper. Denmark, Norway and Finland top the Law & Order index, have next to no bribery, low murder rates, high wallet returns and clean streets. Nothing single-handedly carries them. They are simply good at all of it at once.
This index leans hard on outcomes. American institutions are strong, but the country's murder rate, road deaths and exposure to terrorism are high for a rich nation, and the World Bank's governance scores dock no points for any of it. The index measures what people meet in daily life, not what experts perceive.
Transparency International's better-known Corruption Perceptions Index measures how corrupt experts believe a country to be. It says nothing about whether you personally have to slip someone cash to register a car. That lived experience is what the bribery rate captures, which is why both sit in the index, at different weights.