CTI Score
27 — Chad / Haiti
255075
91 — Nordic / micro-states
No data
Standard rankings will tell you Japan and Mexico have both grown richer over the past decade. They won't tell you that in Japan, someone who finds a wallet stuffed with cash will almost certainly hand it in to the nearest police box. In Mexico, they almost certainly won't.
Where civic trust is high, life is cheaper and lighter. You can leave the bike unlocked and take the contract on a handshake. Where it is low, everything acquires a cost: locks, bribes, lawyers, and the daily tax of having to watch your back. That cost rarely shows up in a country's income statistics. This index is an attempt to measure it directly.
It draws on thirteen separate datasets. Only six percent of a country's score rests on what experts think of its institutions. The rest is built from what people actually do — whether they return the wallet, pay the bribe, obey the traffic law, or sort the rubbish.
Most country rankings of this kind — the World Bank's governance indicators, Transparency International's corruption index, the World Justice Project — ask experts to grade a nation's institutions. That tells you what a country's elite has managed to build. It tells you very little about whether the man at the licence counter expects a bribe.
This index starts from the other end. Its two heaviest components are the Wallet Return Rate and Gallup's Law & Order score, because they record what people meet in ordinary life: whether a stranger returns your lost property, whether you feel safe walking home at night, whether routine paperwork costs an envelope of cash.
Hard outcomes set the floor — murder, road deaths, terrorism, the state of the streets. A country where these have gone badly wrong cannot be high-trust, whatever its citizens tell pollsters. The expert measures of institutional quality are still here, but they are held to six percent of the total. The other ninety-four percent is behaviour.
The thirteen components arrive in wildly different units: dollars, percentages, deaths per hundred thousand, scores on a five-point scale. Before they can be added together, each is rescaled to run from 0 to 100. Otherwise a single large number would quietly swamp the rest. That rescaling is what "normalisation" means.
The two World Bank governance scores run from −2.5 to +2.5 and are stretched evenly onto the 0–100 scale.
Murder, road deaths and terrorism have long tails — a few catastrophic countries that would otherwise squash everyone else into a narrow band. These are placed on a logarithmic scale, so the differences among ordinary countries stay visible.
The shadow economy is converted from its share of GDP, with a floor at 5%, since no economy is entirely above board.
Infrastructure is judged against expectation. Each country's logistics score is set beside what a country of its income would normally manage. A rich country with shabby infrastructure lands below the midpoint; a poorer one that has built unusually well lands above it. This separates real civic investment from the simple fact of being wealthy. It replaces an older competitiveness survey that was discontinued in 2019.
The survey-based measures — Gallup, the World Values Survey, Legatum, the waste index, the bribery rate — already come on comparable scales, so they are used as they are.
The World Bank's governance indicators try to measure how well a country stops public officials from using their office for private gain: whether courts can rein in the powerful, whether contracts hold up without a bribe, whether public money is spent cleanly. The figure pools the judgments of experts, businesses and ordinary citizens.
It is held to just 3% here, and on purpose. It captures how a country's institutions look from the outside, not what its people feel from below. That elite-level quality is real enough, but much of what matters about it already surfaces in the bribery rate, which records what happens at the counter rather than in the boardroom.
Also from the World Bank, this rates how well the machinery of state actually works: whether the civil service is competent, whether policies are sensibly made and then carried out, whether public services turn up when promised. A high score means the trains run on time and the licence arrives without a fight.
Like corruption control, it stays at 3%. What experts make of a bureaucracy is a distant stand-in for what citizens live with. A government can be impressively efficient and still preside over a suspicious, atomised society, and a warm, trusting country can muddle along with mediocre administration.
The World Bank's logistics index asks the freight companies of 138 countries to rate the ports, roads, railways and digital networks they rely on, scoring each from 1 to 5. Since a broader competitiveness survey was discontinued in 2019, it is the best like-for-like measure of infrastructure quality still going.
What counts here is not the raw score but the gap between it and what a country of that wealth ought to manage. A rich country with crumbling infrastructure falls below the midpoint; a poorer one that has built well rises above it. The aim is to catch deliberate investment in shared public goods, rather than simply rewarding money.
The shadow economy is all the work that happens off the books: untaxed, informal, invisible to the state, from the cash-in-hand builder to the firm hiding half its turnover. Its size cannot be measured directly, so economists infer it from clues like electricity use and the demand for cash.
A large shadow economy is a sign that people have given up on the formal system and quietly stepped around it, usually because it is grasping, corrupt or simply useless. Where it is small — under a tenth of the economy — most people and firms pay what they owe without being chased, which takes a real measure of trust in the state.
Gallup asks people in more than 140 countries three plain questions. Do you feel safe walking home alone at night? Has anything been stolen from you in the past year? Have you been assaulted? The score blends their answers with how far they trust the local police.
This is not crime as recorded by the authorities, a figure badly warped by how much goes unreported. It is what people actually live through. Where no one trusts the police, crimes drop out of the official books and the Law & Order score sinks at the same time. The index follows the experience, not the paperwork.
The World Values Survey, the largest study of human attitudes ever run, puts one blunt question to people the world over: generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted, or that you can't be too careful in dealing with others?
The share who pick "most people can be trusted" ranges from under 5% in some countries to over 75% in others. That one number tracks a startling amount: how fast economies grow, how well institutions work, how stable politics is, even how long people live. Societies where strangers extend each other the benefit of the doubt can solve problems that suspicious ones cannot.
Social capital is the web of everyday connection that holds a place together: neighbours who lend a hand, people who volunteer and give, the friends and family you can lean on when things go wrong. The Legatum Prosperity Index gathers survey data on all of it into a single score.
If interpersonal trust is an attitude — do you think strangers are decent? — social capital is the behaviour: do people actually turn up for one another? The two can part ways. A country may voice high trust yet join nothing, or knit tight family networks while keeping outsiders firmly at arm's length.
In 2019 a team of economists handed in 17,303 "lost" wallets at banks, hotels, police stations, theatres and post offices across 40 countries, each holding a little cash, some business cards and a shopping list. Then they waited to see how many were reported, the money untouched.
It may be the cleanest test of plain honesty ever run on this scale. No cameras, no consequences, no one watching. Just a person who has found someone else's wallet, and the quiet choice of what to do about it.
Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer asks ordinary people, not executives or experts, about corruption they have met themselves. The question is direct: in the past year, did anyone ask you for a bribe? The bribery-free rate is the share who got through the year without being shaken down. The 2015–17 edition reached 119 countries and 162,000 people.
This is corruption at street level, not in the ministry. It is the clerk at the vehicle office who expects a little extra, the traffic policeman who wants something to look the other way, the hospital that asks for an unofficial payment before anyone is seen.
Intentional killings per 100,000 people, from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. Homicide is the one violent crime that compares cleanly across borders: the bodies are counted, and everyone means much the same thing by murder. Almost every other crime statistic is bent out of shape by what gets reported and what does not.
A high homicide rate is the mark of something broken at the root, whether gang warfare, a violent state, abuse behind closed doors, or open conflict. It puts a hard ceiling on how far a country's civic trust score can climb.
Traffic deaths per 100,000 people, from the World Health Organization. The toll reflects three things at once: the state of the roads, how seriously traffic law is written and enforced, and the unwritten rules drivers actually keep. Where people overtake on blind bends, ignore seatbelts and treat the speed limit as a rough suggestion, the figure climbs.
This is more than a safety statistic. A deadly road system is a commons left to rot, badly built and barely policed. The countries with the safest roads — Norway, Sweden, Switzerland — got there over decades, by fixing the engineering and the driving culture together.
Yale's Environmental Performance Index measures how well a country handles its everyday rubbish: how much is collected, how much is disposed of properly, how much is recycled. Littered streets, fly-tipping and open dumps are what a neglected public realm looks like.
Rubbish is a revealing test precisely because it is so rarely about money or geography. It comes down to shared habit and collective will. Two countries of equal wealth can treat their common spaces completely differently, and the difference is culture rather than cash.
The Institute for Economics and Peace logs every recorded act of terrorism worldwide — how often, how deadly, and who was behind it — and rolls the year's damage into a single figure.
Steady political violence and civic trust cannot share a country for long. Places that score near zero — Iceland, Japan, most of northern Europe — have made terrorism a non-event in daily life. At the far end are countries where violence has hardened into an ordinary way of settling political scores.
A high score means cleaner streets, safer nights, honest dealings and a public realm that is actually looked after. A low score is the daily cost of living without much trust.
Use the sidebar filters to switch components on and off. The map and rankings move with you, so you can look at civic honesty on its own, or see how much a country's place depends on the wallet test.
Hover over any country for its full breakdown: the raw numbers, the rescaled scores, and the source and year behind each one. A one-line summary points to whatever stands out most about it.
Countries measured on fewer than 8 of the 13 components appear dimmed in the rankings. Their scores still count; they simply rest on less evidence.
Because they do well almost everywhere, not just on paper. Denmark, Norway and Finland top the Law & Order index, have next to no bribery, low murder rates, high wallet returns and clean streets. Nothing single-handedly carries them. They are simply good at all of it at once.
This index leans hard on outcomes. American institutions are strong, but the country's murder rate, road deaths and exposure to terrorism are high for a rich nation, and the World Bank's governance scores dock no points for any of it. The index measures what people meet in daily life, not what experts perceive.
Transparency International's better-known Corruption Perceptions Index measures how corrupt experts believe a country to be. It says nothing about whether you personally have to slip someone cash to register a car. That lived experience is what the bribery rate captures, which is why both sit in the index, at different weights.