8. Security, Wealth & Miscellaneous Global Indices
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A cluster of indices that don't fit neatly into the categories above but recur often enough in current-affairs digests to need their own section — several measure state fragility, military capability, or the risk landscape a country presents.
| Report/Index | Publisher | Frequency | What It Measures | India's Approx. Status (with year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Global Terrorism Index (GTI) | Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), Sydney — the same body behind the Global Peace Index | Annually | Impact of terrorism across a country, weighted by incidents, fatalities, injuries, and property damage over the preceding year | India has generally sat within the top 15 most-affected countries in recent editions, though its GTI score has shown a broadly improving (declining-impact) trend over the past several years |
| Fragile States Index (FSI) | The Fund for Peace, Washington DC | Annually | State fragility/resilience across cohesion, economic, political, and social indicators (12 total), producing a "warning" to "sustainable" spectrum rather than a simple good/bad rank | India is typically placed in the "warning" band, in the lower-middle portion of the table — better positioned than most of its immediate neighbourhood, but well short of the "stable"/"sustainable" bands occupied by advanced economies |
| Global Firepower Index | GlobalFirepower.com (a privately run defence-data website, not a government or multilateral body) | Annually | A composite "PowerIndex" score built from over 60 factors — troop numbers, equipment counts, financial and logistical capacity, geography — for conventional (not nuclear) military strength | India has ranked 4th globally in recent editions, behind the US, Russia, and China |
| Global Financial Centres Index | (see Section 4 — Z/Yen Group) | — | — | — |
| Global Wealth Report | (see Section 2 — UBS) | — | — | — |
| Global Slavery Index | (see Section 2 — Walk Free Foundation) | — | — | — |
| World Risk Report / INFORM Risk Index | World Risk Report: Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft (Germany) with the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict, Bochum University; INFORM Risk Index: a joint European Commission/UN inter-agency initiative | Annually (both) | Exposure and vulnerability to natural hazards combined with a society's coping/adaptive capacity, producing an overall disaster-risk score | India is generally placed in the higher-risk band on both products, driven mainly by high hazard exposure (cyclones, floods, earthquakes across a large and densely populated territory) rather than by weak coping capacity alone |
World Risk Report vs Fragile States Index is worth a one-line separation: the World Risk Report is specifically about natural-hazard disaster risk (cyclones, floods, earthquakes) combined with a society's capacity to cope with them, while the Fragile States Index is about political and institutional fragility — a state can score poorly on one while scoring adequately on the other, and conflating "at risk of natural disaster" with "a fragile state" is a common wrong-answer pattern.
Global Terrorism Index vs Global Peace Index share a publisher (IEP) but measure different things — GTI is narrowly about terrorism impact, while GPI (Section 2) is a much broader "negative peace" measure spanning conflict, militarisation, and societal safety generally; a country can rank very differently on the two if its security challenges are concentrated in one dimension (e.g., a high terrorism impact alongside comparatively low broader militarisation, or vice versa).
Fragile States Index is frequently confused with the Global Peace Index and the Democracy Index simply because all three produce a "how troubled is this country" impression — the discriminator is that FSI is specifically about state capacity and cohesion (can the government actually function, deliver services, and hold the country together), not about peace/conflict levels (GPI) or electoral/political-freedom quality (Democracy Index) — a fragile state can, in principle, be peaceful on the surface while its institutions are hollowing out, and vice versa.
Global Firepower Index is worth flagging as not an intergovernmental or NGO-watchdog product at all — it is a privately maintained website's proprietary formula, with no peer-reviewed academic methodology paper behind it in the way the GPI or HDI have; exams sometimes test whether you know this distinction (i.e., that it isn't a "SIPRI" or "UN" product), since the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is the far more academically rigorous body that publishes separate data on global military expenditure and arms transfers, and is commonly confused with GlobalFirepower.com precisely because both produce "which countries are militarily powerful" content.
Practice Recall. Before reading on: name the two indices from IEP (the same publisher) covered in this book, and state in one line how they differ in scope.
Answer: Global Peace Index (broad "negative peace" — conflict, militarisation, societal safety) and Global Terrorism Index (narrowly, terrorism impact only — incidents, fatalities, injuries, property damage).
A closing methodological note for this section, tying back to Section 0.5: notice how the security-and-wealth cluster above is dominated by statistical/administrative-data products (GTI's incident counts, FSI's twelve measured indicators, Global Firepower's troop-and-equipment tallies, IQAir's sensor readings) far more than by perception surveys — a reflection of the fact that security, military, and wealth data, unlike corruption or democratic quality, is at least nominally observable and countable (troop numbers, wealth-per-adult, PM2.5 readings) even where the underlying source data quality varies enormously by country. This doesn't make these indices immune from dispute — a country's official military or wealth statistics can themselves be contested or opaque — but it does mean the nature of the dispute differs from a CPI-style "your survey methodology is biased" objection; it is more often a "your underlying source data/definitions are wrong or incomplete" objection instead, worth distinguishing if a question asks you to characterise the type of methodological criticism typically levelled at an index in this section versus one in Section 3.