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NCBNational Capability Benchmark
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Challenge the benchmark

Choose a score and give the benchmark a specific reason to reconsider it.

When you submit, the form attaches the current score and confidence for the country and capability you chose.

Submissions are public and start as awaiting review. A maintainer can add a response and signature after review.

Where does Pakistan stand on Anticipation?

Dataset 9.3.0

This page reads one capability from the published data and is recomputed with every release. It separates what Pakistan does, which makes the score, from what the country has, which sits beside the score, and places the country among the 10 countries at the nearest income. The text describes the data and recommends no policy.

What does the score rest on?

Score28.0Confidence0.46usable evidence

The Anticipation score is the equal-weight mean of the positions of two indicators on a 0 to 100 scale that every country sets together. Confidence measures the evidence behind the score and sits beside it as a second number.

The Anticipation score tracks GDP per capita at r = 0.86 across 123 countries.

Observed indicators

  • Scientific articles

    20,519 articles per million people

    World Bank (IP.JRN.ARTC.SC), 2023

    Position on the scale3.0Peer median0.510 peers with a value

  • Statistical performance

    68.1 index 0-100

    World Bank (IQ.SPI.OVRL), 2024

    Position on the scale52.9Peer median47.610 peers with a value

No comparable source yet, so lowering confidence: government foresight capacity and long-horizon research commitments.

What Pakistan has to work with

Beside each condition, two r values read every country at once, one against income and one against the capability score. Where the r with income is much higher than the r with the score, having the condition goes with being rich more than with the capability measured.

Conditions, not scored

What the country has to work with on this capability. The values are shown as the source published them and are not part of the score, the confidence or the trend. The rank counts the countries with a value, best first.

  • R&D expenditureWorld Bank (GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS), 2023

    0.16 % of GDP, rank 93 of 118. Gross domestic expenditure on research and development as a share of GDP.

    A condition, not scored: money committed to research is what a country spends, and spending it does not show the country reads the future well (D122).

    • r with income: 0.62 (116 countries)
    • r with the Anticipation score: 0.73 (117 countries)
    • Peer median: 0.09 % of GDP (9 peers with a value)

  • Researchers in R&DWorld Bank (SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6), 2023

    474 per million people, rank 68 of 114. Full-time-equivalent researchers per million people.

    A condition, not scored: a standing stock of people who could investigate is what a country has, not a record of what they found (D122). Correlates with income but survives size normalization.

    • r with income: 0.74 (112 countries)
    • r with the Anticipation score: 0.87 (113 countries)
    • Peer median: 87.5 per million people (9 peers with a value)

  • Secure internet serversWorld Bank (IT.NET.SECR.P6), 2024

    110 per million people, rank 96 of 125. Servers using encryption in internet transactions, per million people.

    A condition, not scored: a diffusion stock of digital adoption that money buys, not an act of anticipation (D122). Spans four orders of magnitude, so its rank is read on the published value and its correlations on the logged one.

    • r with income: 0.91 (123 countries)
    • r with the Anticipation score: 0.89 (124 countries)
    • Peer median: 89.1 per million people (10 peers with a value)

Where does Pakistan sit among its peers?

The peers are the 10 countries at the nearest income. Income is GDP per capita at purchasing power parity, in constant international dollars, for the latest year the World Bank publishes, and distance is measured on a log scale, where half and double are equally far. No country is picked by hand, and the set changes when the data does.

In this release peer income runs from US$ 4,456 to US$ 7,358, and Pakistan has US$ 5,617 (2025).

0255075100Pakistan
  • Solid ring: usable or good evidence
  • Broken ring: thin evidence, opening further as confidence falls
  • The shaded band is the middle half of the set and the line inside it is the median.
  • Kenya: 31.9
  • Côte d'Ivoire: 28.6
  • Pakistan: 28.0
  • Ghana: 26.1
  • Zimbabwe: 25.9
  • Honduras: 24.5
  • Myanmar: 23.3
  • Tajikistan: 22.9
  • Nepal: 20.5
  • Papua New Guinea: 4.5
  • Republic of the Congo: 0.4

What separates Pakistan from its peers?

Pakistan scores 28 on Anticipation, above the median of the 10 scored peers, which is 23.9.

Indicators placed above the peer median on the scale: scientific articles and statistical performance.

Pakistan has more than the peer median of r&D expenditure, researchers in R&D, and secure internet servers.

Each sentence compares one position with one median. Why a difference exists, and what to do about it, lie outside this data.

What this reading does not show

  • A national score is a coarse proxy. A capability forms in firms, cities, networks and groups below the level of the country, and a national average only describes the conditions they work in.
  • Peers share income and nothing else. Size, production structure, region and political regime are outside the rule, and a set of 10 countries can change with any revision to GDP.
  • An r reads the whole set at once and says nothing about one country alone. A correlation does not show a cause either.
  • And the ones every score in the benchmark carries: artefact A8, artefact A10.