GreatCountry.org attempts to answer the question that intrigues everybody. What is the greatest country in the world? The site ranks 37 factors covering social, economic, environmental and cultural life: from Olympic medals per capita and asylum applications received to loneliness, generosity, biodiversity, working hours, food self-sufficiency and family orientation. Every factor sits on the same z-score scale, and a country's overall position is the mean of those scores. The table below shows each country's rank per indicator (1 = best).
The composite averages 37 dimensions, which encodes one set of priorities. Different priorities give different answers. Here are the top 5 countries on each theme alone.
Every source listed below is pulled straight from its publisher, in the unit the publisher actually reports (deaths per 100,000, micrograms per cubic meter, score on a 0 to 10 scale, whatever they use). No re-interpretation.
Each indicator becomes a z-score: the country's distance from the mean, divided by the standard deviation. Values past plus or minus three are clipped, so one extreme outlier never sinks the rest of a country's score. For indicators where lower is better (pollution, homicide), the sign is flipped so positive z always means good.
A country's score is the mean of its z-scores across the indicators where it has data. Countries with fewer than ten data points are dropped. The numbers in each column show the country's rank within that indicator's reporting set.
Indicators that move together are not separate measurements. Pairwise correlation across all 28 candidates flagged nine as duplicates of another in the panel (r=0.75 or higher). Those nine are listed at the bottom of the page with the reason for each.
Sixty-four indicators were considered. Thirty-seven made the final composite. Twenty-seven were left out, either as duplicates of indicators already in the panel (caught by pairwise correlation r >= 0.75 or by PCA hidden-loading checks), because the available data was unreliable, culturally biased, or methodologically suspect, or because their coverage fell below the minimum useful country count.