Singapore among top 10 worsened countries in Fragile States Index

This is also the country’s worst in 8 years.

The Fund For Peace (FFP) released its 10th annual Fragile States Index last week, assessing existing social, economic and political pressures faced by each of the 178 countries under its coverage. Primary indicators include demographic pressures, uneven economic development, poverty and economic decline, group grievance, state legitimacy, public services, and human flight and brain drain, among others.

Singapore ranks 158th, and is currently assessed as “very stable” even if the trend took a huge downturn from 2013, with group grievance, external intervention and economy the top 3 indicators that worsened.

The assessment over an 8-year period shows that Singapore started strong at an index score of 30.9 in 2006. The score has been worsening ever since until it improved from 35.5 in 2012 to 34 in 2013. This year, the score worsened to 36, the highest in 10 years.

Africa received a beating with all the worst 5 countries coming from its region: South Sudan, Somalia, African Republic, Congo (D.R.), and Sudan.

Here’s more from the report:

The Fragile States Index (FSI), produced by The Fund for Peace, is a critical tool in highlighting not only the normal pressures that all states experience, but also in identifying when those pressures are pushing a state towards the brink of failure. By highlighting pertinent issues in weak and failing states, the FSI — and the social science framework and software application upon which it is built — makes political risk assessment and early warning of conflict accessible to policy-makers and the public at large.

The strength of the FSI is its ability to distill millions of pieces of information into a form that is relevant as well as easily digestible and informative. Daily, The Fund for Peace collects thousands of reports and information from around the world, detailing the existing social, economic and political pressures faced by each of the 178 countries that we analyze.

The FSI is based on The Fund for Peace’s proprietary Conflict Assessment System Tool (CAST) analytical platform. Based on comprehensive social science methodology, data from three primary sources is triangulated and subjected to critical review to obtain final scores for the FSI.