The Good Country Index: Possibly the Most Malicious Ranking of Countries
On the website of the Good Country Index, it says: “The idea of the Good Country Index is simple: to measure what each country on earth contributes to the common good of humanity, and what it takes away, relative to its size.”
If you look at the actual index, you’ll find the top ten “good” countries: Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Ireland, the UK, Austria and Norway. There is a pattern: all of them are in Europe; all of them either had oversea colonies, or had exploited the nowadays the third world countries through other means: wars, slave trade, uneven international trades, etc.
You may wonder how a country like the United Kingdom, who has extracted so much wealth from the rest of the world, can be praised as generous just by giving away a tiny amount of what they have taken. Admitted by the BBC, “At the beginning of the 18th Century, India’s share of the world economy was 23%, as large as all of Europe put together. By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to less than 4%.” And India is just one part of “the empire on which the sun never sets”. Before these countries are being praised as “good”, does the amount of what they give match up with what they have stolen? Clearly, this is not taken into consideration.
Another factor that wasn’t taken into consideration is the exploitation which is still taking place today — mostly through processes of globalisation. Ever since the 70s, literatures have given proofs on how the free flow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is used as a tool to exploit the host countries, which happened mainly through unfair trade agreements. In many cases, even the aid money played a significant part in preventing the host country to exercise its sovereignty to protect its economy. (Note that these are rigorous economic research published by UN, see World Investment Report 1991-2018.)
What’s worse? FDI outflow, proven as a way of exploitation, is actually one of the indicator for a country’s good-being. Under the same category, UN volunteers abroad is another indicator for being a “good” country. However, being a volunteer abroad is so costly, in many developing countries even a middle class family would struggle to support their child to volunteer overseas. And as a result, a country in which people simply cannot afford to volunteer abroad would be deemed as “bad”, or at least “not good”.
Some other indicators are problematic too. For instance, under the category of International Peace & Security, one positive indicator is the number of peacekeeping troops sent oversea for UN missions. Let alone the controversies around whether the UN intervention is good or bad for the country, there is no consideration for the child sexual abuse caused by the UN peacekeepers in countries like Haiti.
Another indicator, under the category of Culture, is Freedom of movement, i.e. visa restrictions — numbers of countries and territories that citizens can enter without a visa. For countries like Afghanistan and Iraq (as countries with lowest rate of visa-free access), because their citizens are not allowed to move freely due to restrictions from other countries, they’re deemed as not contributing to “culture” — regardless of the rich culture and history that they have which have impacted the whole world. How about the countries that do not allow others to “contribute”?
Other than the existing indicators, even under the category of Prosperity & Equality, not a word was mentioned about gender equality or racial equality, even though these constitute some of the most pressing issues in the world.
If you scroll down the list of “good countries”, the bottom 50 are all counties considered as the “Global South”, mostly located in Africa, Middle East, Central and South America. You can argue that the opposite of “good” isn’t “bad”, but as such a basic concept that human beings have learnt since birth, people will think at the bottom of the list there are the “bad” countries.
Since the indicators are heavily relying on the financial capability of the country, the poorer countries who cannot afford to “be good” are automatically at the bottom. It matches with the recent trend in Western countries — criminalising poverty; “if you’re poor, you’re bad”. And the list of “bad” countries overlaps the origins of people who face the most discriminations, and this almost serves as excuses for racism. This can almost justify the racist views that some people have over Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people— “because they’re from the ‘bad’ countries, and they don’t contribute to the world”.
I have myself had a conversation with Simon Anholt, who created the Good Country Index. When asked how he could be comfortable using such a simplistic and judgemental concept of “goodness”, he told me that if he were to use any other concepts more complicated than “good”, the general public wouldn’t be able to understand. In the event “Africa Stories” at University College London, he and his team presented this index as giving Africa a chance to “prove to the world that they can contribute”. He said that Africa has to move beyond the perception of being “a victim” and find alternative ways to contribute to the world.
However, the problem isn’t that Africa is NOT contributing, it’s rather that the world isn’t recognising Africa’s contribution. By neglecting the exploitation in the history, the West will never acknowledge the African contribution no matter what “Africa” does. The burden of proof does not lie on Africa. And this list of “good countries” and “bad countries” does not help, because it exactly reinforces the stigmas attached to developing countries, making it even harder for a fair recognition of their enormous contribution to the world.
