February 23, 2011
By J. J. Messner
The Failed States Index

As multiple countries within the Arab world descend into chaos, it is useful to analyze the pressures bearing upon those countries. In so doing, it is equally important to review multiple sources of analysis.

On February 9, The Economist published an Index of Unrest among Arab League countries, which was also dubbed “The Shoe-Throwers Index.” The Index combined factors such as youth bulge, longevity of administration, corruption indicators, GDP per head and media censorship.

The Fund for Peace decided to compare The Economist’s Shoe-Throwers Index against our own Failed States Index (albeit, the 2010 edition as we are still analyzing the 2011 numbers). What we found was that a number of countries were similarly scored by both indices. However, the different indicators used for both indices clearly resulted in some outliers, such as Iraq, Mauritania, Lebanon and Kuwait.

No index is ever completely accurate, and we invite debate on the differences between the results of this comparative analysis.

(Note: for the purposes of comparison, the Failed States Index numbers are set from a base of 100 instead of the normal 120 basis points.)