Methodology v2: an honest score can't hide its worst dimension

Quantamentry — a non-compensatory penalty, a 'monitored' tier, three new indicators, and a public changelog.

The composite has always been a weighted average of seven dimensions. Averages are readable, but they have a well-known failure mode: a strong showing in six places can quietly mask a collapse in the seventh. A country running catastrophic inflation could still post a middling composite if its growth, governance, and liquidity readings were decent enough to pull the mean back up. That is exactly the kind of averaging-away that makes a score look reassuring when it shouldn't. Methodology v2 fixes it, adds three indicators, and — importantly — dates and versions the whole thing. Here's what changed and why.

One collapsed pillar can no longer hide

The headline change is that the composite is now non-compensatory at the extremes. When a single dimension genuinely collapses — a score below the floor we treat as "broken" — it now drags the composite down through a continuous penalty scaled to how bad that dimension is. The worse the worst pillar, the harder it pulls.

The point is to stop one catastrophic reading from being offset by six healthy ones. Think of a hyperinflation economy — the archetypal cases are places like Turkey or Venezuela, where the credibility-gap dimension is on the floor because actual inflation sits nowhere near any plausible target. Under a pure weighted average, a respectable governance or growth reading could partly rescue the headline number. Under v2 it can't: a collapsed pillar is treated as the emergency it is, and the composite reflects that rather than smoothing it into an unremarkable middle.

We kept the penalty continuous rather than a hard cliff on purpose. A cliff — "below X, cap the whole score" — would create discontinuities where a hair's-worth of movement in one dimension swings the composite wildly. A ramp scaled to severity behaves sensibly: a dimension that is merely weak barely registers, one that is truly broken bites hard, and everything in between moves smoothly.

Scored, but not ranked: the 'monitored' tier

The second change is about coverage honesty. Some countries simply don't have enough of the seven dimensions available to earn a place in a headline ranking. The classic example is a country that shares its central bank with several neighbours — the franc-zone members, for instance, run a common monetary authority, so there is no country-specific policy-rate decision or English-language communication to read. Scoring those thin dimensions as if they were full readings, then ranking the country against economies with the complete stack, would be comparing unlike with unlike.

So v2 adds a coverage-based eligibility gate. A country with too few available dimensions is still scored — you can still look it up and see what we have — but it moves into a "monitored" tier and is held out of the headline ranking rather than ranked on data too thin to compare fairly. Alongside it we introduced a four-class taxonomy for missing data, so that every gap on a country page is explicit about why a number is absent: genuinely unknown, not applicable to that country, and so on. The principle is the same one that governs the grey countries on our new world map — say plainly where the data runs out instead of manufacturing a number to fill the hole.

Three new indicators

v2 also widens what the score can see, with three additions chosen because each closes a real blind spot:

• FATF grey/black-list status feeds the governance dimension. A grey- or black-listing by the Financial Action Task Force is a discrete external judgement on a country's financial-integrity controls, so it applies as a flat penalty on top of the World Bank governance estimates — 10 points for a grey listing, 25 for black, floored at zero — rather than being averaged in as if it were a seventh governance survey.
• Short-term external debt versus reserves feeds liquidity. This is the classic rollover-risk read: debt falling due inside a year set against the reserves available to meet it. It comes from the World Bank's International Debt Statistics.
• A debt-sustainability gap also feeds liquidity. It is derived from IMF WEO projections — the primary balance a country is actually running versus the balance that would stabilise its debt ratio given its growth, inflation, and interest cost. We are explicit that this is our own approximation, not the IMF's formal debt-sustainability analysis: the interest rate isn't directly observed, so we use the policy rate as a documented proxy (falling back to the sovereign yield), and we cap the inflation term at 10 percentage points so a hyperinflation reading doesn't make the debt math look artificially benign.

A version number and a public changelog

The last change is procedural, and for anyone citing us it may be the most useful. The methodology page now carries an explicit version — v2 — and a dated changelog underneath it, newest first, describing exactly what moved and when. If the math changes in future, you'll see the entry. And the "What this score is NOT" section stays where it is, in plain language: this is not a sovereign-default probability, not an ESG or political rating, and not investment advice. If you quote a number, quote the version it came from.

One honest caveat: the transition is gradual

Published scores are smoothed — the number you see is 0.7 of today's raw composite plus 0.3 of a trailing 90-day average. That damping is deliberate; it stops one noisy data point from whipping a score around. But it also means v2 does not snap into place overnight. As the trailing window fills with v2 values, existing scores migrate to their v2 levels over roughly 90 days rather than jumping the day the change shipped. If a country's number drifts over the coming weeks with no obvious news behind it, this is very likely why.

See it live

The full methodology — every dimension, the weights, the new indicators, and the changelog — is at quantamentry.com/methodology. Every country page shows how these mechanics land for that specific country, dimension by dimension.

To watch how v2 moves the countries you follow, Create a free account — watch 3 countries. Free, and it takes about a minute.

Sources: FATF grey/black-list status (Financial Action Task Force); short-term external debt and reserves (World Bank International Debt Statistics); debt-sustainability inputs (IMF World Economic Outlook); governance estimates (World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators). All scoring runs on free public data.

— Quantamentry, July 28, 2026