The 70 indicators are insights into how economies function. They help us to understand, for instance, how a nation’s capital account peculiarities might put its financial system at risk. Or which economies are signatories to key global environmental accords – and which are not. They help us learn about economies that rely more on forced labor than their peers do. Or where gender discrimination is more of an issue. Or where carbon pricing is taking off. 

And we constantly refine the indicators with each iteration of the Index, which from this year will be annually published. This year, we added consumer price inflation and healthcare as additional indicators in the calculation of the sustainability of an economy’s trade.

The inclusion of each indicator is a collection of deliberate decisions. When we wanted to measure the effectiveness of an economy’s healthcare system as a factor of sustainable global trade, we debated with our consultants, Switzerland’s International Institute for Management Development, which indicator to use. We eschewed total healthcare spending due to the failure of such spending sometimes to translate to a strong public health system. Neither did public healthcare spending meet our cut, as we felt there were too many variations of what that term means to make for equitable international comparisons. We ultimately picked life expectancy as an overall measure – a literal summation of life-and-death choices – of an economy’s healthcare system.

When we chose to include an assessment of the “ecological footprint” in economies, to buttress carbon emissions per capita as a measure of environmental stewardship, we wanted an indicator that quantifies how much natural resources it takes to support an economy. It tells us how fast we consume resources and produce waste, essentially adding a fresh dimension to measuring the human impact on the environment beyond carbon output.

And we will introduce this year an indicator that measures how much modern slavery might be used to produce your imports and exports. The findings are a sobering indication of how the appetite of developed economies is driving forced labor, often more than we imagine. We hope such findings rally our wider policy, business, and academic communities, to discuss solutions. We need to know more about our supply chains.