Country Power Index
A replication of the eight key measures of country power from Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (2021), rebuilt entirely from open data. Decade-scale by design: the inputs update roughly once a year, and so does this page.
As of 2025: the United States still leads on the eight measures, but the gap to China has closed by 79% since 2000; the Eurozone tracks sideways.
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Composite power index
0-1 · equal-weight eight gauges · 1980-2025Data table
| Year | US | CN | EZ | JP | IN | UK | RU | DE | FR | NL | ES |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | 0.91 | - | 0.56 | 0.46 | - | 0.18 | - | 0.22 | 0.13 | 0.09 | 0.01 |
| 1985 | 0.89 | - | 0.48 | 0.52 | - | 0.17 | - | 0.19 | 0.11 | 0.09 | 0.01 |
| 1990 | 0.76 | 0.27 | 0.55 | 0.60 | 0.12 | 0.15 | 0.22 | 0.19 | 0.11 | 0.07 | 0.01 |
| 1995 | 0.79 | 0.30 | 0.57 | 0.50 | 0.13 | 0.14 | 0.23 | 0.18 | 0.11 | 0.06 | 0.01 |
| 2000 | 0.90 | 0.32 | 0.57 | 0.32 | 0.14 | 0.13 | 0.22 | 0.17 | 0.11 | 0.04 | 0.02 |
| 2005 | 0.83 | 0.33 | 0.55 | 0.30 | 0.12 | 0.14 | 0.18 | 0.19 | 0.12 | 0.06 | 0.04 |
| 2010 | 0.82 | 0.45 | 0.55 | 0.26 | 0.16 | 0.12 | 0.17 | 0.22 | 0.10 | 0.04 | 0.04 |
| 2015 | 0.80 | 0.56 | 0.48 | 0.21 | 0.19 | 0.12 | 0.15 | 0.18 | 0.09 | 0.05 | 0.04 |
| 2020 | 0.75 | 0.57 | 0.45 | 0.19 | 0.22 | 0.13 | 0.13 | 0.17 | 0.09 | 0.06 | 0.05 |
| 2025 | 0.72 | 0.60 | 0.44 | 0.18 | 0.24 | 0.13 | 0.12 | 0.16 | 0.09 | 0.05 | 0.07 |
The eight gauges
cross-country z-scores · 11-country universeMethodology
Chapter 1 of the book defines the power score as "a roughly equal average" of the measures; this replication therefore weights the eight gauges equally. Each underlying stat becomes a per-year cross-country z-score over Dalio's 11-country universe (US, China, Eurozone, Germany, Japan, India, UK, France, Netherlands, Russia, Spain); a gauge is the mean of its stat z-scores, the composite the mean of its gauges (at least five required), min-max scaled to 0-1 across the panel. The four euro members are drawn as muted context lines: they are contained in the Eurozone aggregate, so giving them equal visual weight would double-count.
| Gauge | Book's stats (appendix) | Open dataset | Proxy notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Economic Output | share of world GDP (PPP-adjusted) | World Bank NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD | as in book |
| Trade | share of global exports | World Bank NE.EXP.GNFS.CD | goods + services; Eurozone scaled by 0.5 to strip intra-euro trade (Eurostat intra share ~50%) |
| Military Strength | share of global military spending; share of military personnel | World Bank MS.MIL.XPND.CD (SIPRI) + MS.MIL.TOTL.P1 | personnel series ends 2020, carried forward |
| Innovation & Technology | shares of global patent applications, R&D spending, researchers | World Bank IP.PAT.RESD (WIPO) + GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS x GDP + SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6 x population | patents end 2021, carried forward |
| Education | share of world's bachelor's degrees; years of education; PISA scores | World Bank SE.TER.ENRL + SE.TER.ENRR; OWID mean years of schooling (Barro-Lee); OWID PISA maths | degrees share proxied by tertiary enrolment headcount |
| Markets & Financial Center | share of world equity market cap and trading volume; share of transactions in currency | World Bank CM.MKT.LCAP.CD | market cap share only - volume and transaction shares have no open source. Eurozone series ends 2018, carried forward |
| Reserve Currency Status | share of global currency reserves; share of global debt in currency | IMF COFER (SDMX API) | reserve share only; euro assigned to the Eurozone; book leaves euro members blank here, so do we |
| Cost Competitiveness | quality-adjusted labour cost | derived: OWID years of schooling + World Bank GDP per capita PPP | INVENTED PROXY: 0.5 x z(years of schooling) - z(log GDP per capita). The one gauge with no direct open equivalent |
Honest limitations
- The book's Empire Score averages 18 measures, including governance, character and infrastructure; this page replicates the eight key measures only. Rank ordering broadly matches the book's August 2021 table; absolute levels do not, and are only comparable within this page.
- Sparse and slow sources (PISA's three-yearly waves, five-yearly schooling data, lagging patent counts) are carried forward at their last z-score for up to 8 years, so recent years lean partly on lagged readings. The composite is a trailing 3-year mean - year-to-year wiggle at this timescale is composition noise, not signal.
- China's official statistics enter several gauges unadjusted; treat its readings as reported-by-China rather than independently verified. Russia's post-2022 data has gaps in the harmonised sources.
- Seven of eight gauges are quantity shares, which structurally favour large countries - as does the book.
Sources
- exports - World Bank API v2, indicator NE.EXP.GNFS.CD (to 2025)
- gdp_pc_ppp - World Bank API v2, indicator NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD (to 2025)
- gdp_ppp - World Bank API v2, indicator NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD (to 2025)
- labor_force - World Bank API v2, indicator SL.TLF.TOTL.IN (to 2025)
- market_cap - World Bank API v2, indicator CM.MKT.LCAP.CD (to 2025)
- mil_personnel - World Bank API v2, indicator MS.MIL.TOTL.P1 (to 2020)
- milex - World Bank API v2, indicator MS.MIL.XPND.CD (to 2024)
- patents - World Bank API v2, indicator IP.PAT.RESD (to 2021)
- pisa - Our World in Data (CC-BY), https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pisa-test-score-mean-performance-on-the-mathematics-scale.csv (to 2022)
- population - World Bank API v2, indicator SP.POP.TOTL (to 2025)
- rd_pct_gdp - World Bank API v2, indicator GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS (to 2024)
- rd_spend - derived: GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS x NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD (to 2024)
- researchers_pm - World Bank API v2, indicator SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6 (to 2024)
- researchers_total - derived: SP.POP.SCIE.RD.P6 x SP.POP.TOTL (to 2024)
- reserve_share - IMF COFER (SDMX 2.1 API, api.imf.org), % of allocated reserves (to 2026)
- tertiary_enrol - World Bank API v2, indicator SE.TER.ENRR (to 2025)
- tertiary_students - World Bank API v2, indicator SE.TER.ENRL (to 2019)
- years_schooling - Our World in Data (CC-BY), https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/mean-years-of-schooling-long-run.csv (to 2020)
- method - Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, Ch. 1 and appendix. Data: World Bank CC-BY 4.0, Our World in Data CC-BY, IMF COFER, SIPRI via World Bank.
Generated 22 Aug 2026. Refreshed annually.