FAQs

The Legatum Prosperity Index™ is a framework that provides a unique insight into how prosperity – characterised by inclusive societies, open economies, and empowered people – is forming and changing across the world. It is an annual ranking of 167 countries, which together contain 99.4% of the world’s population. It uses 300 country-level indicators, grouped into 67 policy-focused elements across 12 pillars, to measure the current state of prosperity in these countries and how it has changed over the past decade.

The Prosperity Index has been purposefully designed to be a transformational tool, and our ambition is that leaders around the world use it to help set their agendas for growth and development, and also enable others to hold them to account.

We would be delighted if you used and shared the Index findings on social media and in other formats such as articles, blog posts, and presentations. When doing so, please reference the Prosperity Index as your source and, where possible, link back to this website. Our preferred format for citations is: “Source: 2023 Legatum Prosperity Index™ (www.prosperity.com)”. If you are referencing specific indicators used in the Index, please refer to the primary source and include a footnote or similar to highlight that this was taken from the Legatum Prosperity Index™. However, we do not allow our data to be used for commercial or revenue-generating purposes. Further information on this can be found in the Terms of Use section.

To cover both economic and social wellbeing, the Prosperity Index faces the challenge of finding a meaningful measure of success at a national level.

We endeavour to create an Index that is methodologically sound. Details of the steps involved to select the indicators, standardise and appropriately weight the data, and provide scores is available here. We have also published a full methodology report with further details, which is available for download here.

For some countries in the world there is a lack of available credible data and we have covered over 99% of the world’s population in the Index. To maintain a high level of quality, we only include countries that have data available for at least 50% of our indicators. We are always looking to include new countries as more data becomes available.

A full data set, with all the datapoints used in the construction of the Index, is available for download here

A full data set, with all the datapoints used in the construction of the Index, is available for download here.

The Prosperity Index includes 300 indicators for each country, which are grouped into 67 elements and 12 pillars. The data for these indicators is obtained from internationally recognised and reliable sources, such as the World Bank or the Gallup© World Poll. We always use the most recently available data in order to paint an accurate picture of each country. In a few cases the data we use may not have been updated at the source.

We are always happy to answer questions about the Prosperity Index and to provide more detail on specific enquiries. Please contact us by e-mail on info@li.com or by phone +44 (0) 207 148 5400.