Prosperity Index
The Blomstra Prosperity Index is a composite score (0–100) that quantifies a country’s real-world livability and opportunity. It combines five pillars — Income Potential, Affordability, Human Development, Freedom & Governance, and Safety — into a single, transparent measure designed for relocation research, investment context, and cross-country comparison.
A higher score indicates greater prosperity. The index is refreshed weekly and draws exclusively from authoritative, public data sources — never fabricated, never scraped, never manually estimated.
The Five Pillars
Each pillar captures a distinct dimension of what makes a country livable. Together they answer a question no single metric can: not just how rich a country is, but how well an individual can actually build a life there.
⚙️ Adaptive weighting: if a data point is genuinely unavailable for a country in a given week, that pillar is left out of its composite for that country rather than assumed — and the remaining weights are automatically rebalanced so the score always reflects real data, never a placeholder.
Data Sources
All data is sourced from internationally recognised institutions with open APIs and transparent methodologies — the same institutional standard used across every Blomstra index.
| Pillar | Source | Indicator | Update Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Income Potential | World Bank | NY.GNP.PCAP.CD |
Annual (latest year available) |
| Affordability | World Bank / International Comparison Program | PA.NUS.GDP.PLI |
Annual, refreshed weekly |
| Human Development | World Bank + World Health Organization | Education, connectivity & life expectancy indicators | Annual, refreshed weekly |
| Freedom & Governance | World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators | Voice & Accountability, Rule of Law | Annual, refreshed weekly |
| Safety | World Bank | Political Stability, homicide rate | Annual, refreshed weekly |
🔍 Auditability: Every data point traces back to a verifiable public source. We do not use proprietary panels, paid consumer datasets, or black-box estimates.
How the Score Is Built
Raw indicators arrive on wildly different scales — a homicide rate and a governance score have nothing in common numerically. Each pillar is independently normalized to a common 0–100 scale before being combined, using a calibration approach suited to that pillar’s real-world distribution (some are scaled logarithmically, where the difference at the low end matters far more than at the high end; others are scaled linearly, where differences are more evenly meaningful throughout the range).
The exact calibration constants for each pillar are part of Blomstra’s internal methodology and are not published in full, to preserve the integrity of the ranking against gaming or reverse-engineering — consistent with how comparable institutional indices (sovereign credit ratings, macro risk scores) handle their internal weighting logic.
Prosperity Tiers
Scores are mapped to five intuitive tiers:
Strengths & Weaknesses Profiles
Beyond a single score, every country is profiled against its own five pillars to surface where it genuinely stands out and where it lags — relative to itself, not to an absolute bar. A country’s listed “weakness” can still be a strong number in absolute terms; the profile describes the shape of that country’s own balance, not a verdict on any single pillar.
Transparency & Data Vintage
Every refresh of the index reports the countries covered and the total scored — so you always know the scope of the current ranking. Underlying source data typically reflects the most recently reported year available per country, which can vary slightly between countries depending on how quickly each government or institution publishes.
📅 Example: 195 countries scored · updated weekly · sourced from World Bank and WHO
Regional and income-group aggregates (e.g. “Sub-Saharan Africa,” “High income”) are never included as rankable entities — only real countries are scored.
Limitations
- The index is a snapshot based on the latest available official statistics — it does not predict future trajectory.
- Some smaller or less-surveyed countries have thinner underlying data than major economies, which the index accounts for but cannot fully eliminate.
- The index does not capture every dimension of lived experience (climate, culture, personal fit) — it is a quantitative starting point, not a substitute for on-the-ground research.
- It is a comparative tool intended to inform decisions, not make them for you.