Failed States Index
Which are the most unstable nations in the world? Check out the first annual “Failed States Index“. Roughly two billion people live in countries that are in danger of collapse. Some countries rankings: Ivory Coast #1, Iraq #4, Somalia #5, Afghanistan #11, North Korea #13, Pakistan #34, Ukraine #38, Belarus #43, Saudia Arabia #45, Turkey #49, Iran #57, Cuba #58, Russia #59 - Here’s the top 20:
Link via Johan Norberg’s blog
I’d sure like to know how “External Intervention” is calculated. How much does Turkey’s 7.0 in that respect affect the sum total? Is it really true that Turkey is doing worse than Russia, Cuba and Iran?
Comment by Helsinkian — Thu, Jul 28th, 2005 @ 1:46 pm
Well, I guess “Delegitimization of State” is the key indicator that makes Turkey closer to a failed state in this statistic than some countries I certainly wouldn’t have expected to score better than Turkey.
What it means is that state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal or ineffective. I wonder if a country where most citizens were libertarians would hit close to ten in that scale?
Turkey scores 9.7. This means the citizens do not trust the state, hence the state is closer to failure.
Russia scores 9.4, Iran 9.1. Cuba and Vietnam, where the citizens trust the state more than they do in Turkey (a NATO country), get scores of 7.8 and 7.6, respectively in the column “Delegitimization of State”.
Comment by Helsinkian — Thu, Jul 28th, 2005 @ 2:00 pm