Wealth is not capability

Name: NCB, the National Capability Benchmark
Creator: Envisioning
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Most international indices measure income and stop there. NCB tests whether a country's ability to anticipate change, coordinate around it and build what it decides is something separate, and whether public data can see it.

One capability at a time

Switch capability and watch the countries move. A country that sits high on one of these can sit at the floor of the next, which is why there is no overall ranking here.

How capable is the country of identifying and preparing for emerging change?

Reacts to change

Change is met once it has already arrived.

124 countries scored, median 41.3. Point at a flag to read the country, click it to open the profile.

Sees change early

Signals are read while there is still time to act.

Solid ring: usable or good evidence
Broken ring: thin evidence, opening further as confidence falls
The shaded band is the middle half of the field and the line inside it is the median.

1 of 125 countries have too few observed indicators on anticipation to publish a score, so they are not drawn. Open the anticipation page for the indicators behind these scores.

A score from 0 to 100 is a position inside the frame that all the benchmark countries set: zero is the weakest on a dimension and 100 is the strongest. A score of 10 puts a country near the floor of that frame and does not mean 10 percent of a capability.

Nine scores, read together

A profile draws all nine at once, so a strength and a weakness show up in the same glance.

The widest case today is Malawi, at 83.4 on coordination and 0.4 on experimentation, a gap of 83 points inside one country. An average of the nine would erase it. All 125 countries are drawn as shapes, and compare puts one country beside up to three others. The capabilities directory reads the same data the other way, one capability across every country.

How much of this is income?

If a capability were only a country's income, this would be an income table. The test runs on every release.

The nine capabilities correlate with GDP per head from 0.25 on shared purpose to 0.86 on anticipation. Six of the nine come through the test and three do not, which the project publishes as a known failure. Taken together, one shared factor carries 49.4% of the variation across 115 countries and correlates 0.81 with income. Take income out and countries at the same income still differ in which capabilities they are strong on, by more than chance would give across 115 countries. The thesis makes the argument and draws the result, and the diagnostics hold the full test.

has data
no dataset
retired
condition, not scored
overlaps with
the capability's own correlation

How Brazil's institutions connect

Every system of the Brazilian state against every other, with each cell shaded by the number of relations between the two. The map helps explain a score but is not an input to any score.

What each country should work on

The scores turn into three lists: what to raise, what to measure first and what to hold.

125 agendas are computed from the same data, one per country. Beside them sit 742 documented deliveries, filed against indicators that have no dataset behind them. None of those records moves a score. They are what a country has already built where the benchmark can only record a gap.

Check the numbers

The method, the limits and the reasoning behind each choice are published beside the data.

Dataset: 9.3.0
Countries: 125
Indicators: 34 of 75
18 declared gaps.
Generated: 2026-10-03

The method explains how a statistic becomes a score, the limits record where the data is wrong about the world, the decision log says what would overturn each choice, and the challenge page is where you file an objection.

Who built this

A research prototype from Envisioning. It is early, the gaps are declared, and it needs institutions to improve it.

Envisioning researches how societies anticipate and act on change. The benchmark scores each country's capabilities from public data and states how confident each score is. The about page records where the method fails. To send a correction, use the contact page.