How the numbers are made
What we read
Every morning, 3,000 local outlets in 115 countries, through their public RSS feeds, in their own language. A story belongs to the country of the outlet that published it, not to the country it is about: "from Brazil" means what the Brazilian press printed. Countries come in two tiers. Tier 1 (37 countries) gets a written briefing every day: a selection of 3–5 stories, each with a kind, a severity and its sources. Tier 2 (83 countries) has no written briefing yet: its page is built from the articles that passed the risk gate, counted, never read by an editor — and says so.
| Tier | Countries | What is published | Where the numbers come from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | 37 | A written briefing every day: 3–5 stories, each with a kind, a severity and its sources | Story severities given by the editor |
| Tier 2 | 83 | A signals page: the day's articles by kind, pressure against the country's own baseline, attention, the outlets read | Article counts — nobody has read these articles |
The eight kinds of signal
Every story and every counted article is one of eight kinds, fixed. Each answers one question for someone with money or operations in the country.
| Kind | The question it answers | Risk label |
|---|---|---|
| Regulation | What rule changed? | Regulatory risk |
| Disruption | What stopped working? | Operational risk |
| Internal tension | Is the country holding together? | Stability risk |
| Safety & health | Can people and operations stay? | Safety & health risk |
| Companies | Who moved? | Corporate risk |
| Markets | What did prices do? | Financial risk |
| Trade | What crossed the border? | Trade risk |
| Politics | What changes the rules next? | Political risk |
Severity
Each briefing story carries a severity: 1 minor (worth knowing), 2 material (changes a decision for some readers), 3 severe (changes a decision for most readers with exposure). Severities exist only for tier-1 stories; counted articles have none, because nobody has read them.
Pressure, tier 1
For each kind, pressure is the sum of the severities of the stories of that kind over the last 30 days. The level is a word for that sum. The hub shows the level, the change against the 30 days before, the number of stories and the latest one; the 90-day curves are the same sum recomputed every day. A press signal, not a credit rating.
| Level | Points over 30 days |
|---|---|
| Quiet | 0 |
| Low | 1–3 |
| Elevated | 4–8 |
| High | 9+ |
Pressure, tier 2
For a country without a briefing, the same table counts articles rather than severities: the number of articles of each kind that passed the risk gate in the last 30 days, against the country's own baseline — the mean count over the previous three 30-day windows (fewer while the country has less history; none in its first month, and the page then says "no baseline yet"). A baseline below 1 is read as 1, so a single article never reads High against an empty baseline.
| Level | Articles over 30 days, against the baseline |
|---|---|
| Quiet | no article |
| Low | up to the baseline |
| Elevated | up to twice the baseline |
| High | above twice the baseline |
Attention
Attention counts the articles, across every outlet we read, that mention a country — whatever they are about. A hub shows the day's count against the country's 30-day average and the 90-day curve, once 14 days of data exist. The front page lists the day's spikes: countries whose mentions are at least 2 standard deviations above their 30-day mean, with at least 10 mentions, and the source countries leading the coverage.
The Country Pressure Index
One figure comparable across countries, computed every night for both tiers. For each kind, the day's pressure (severities for tier 1, the 30-day article count for tier 2) is compared with the country's own previous 90 days: z = (today − mean) ÷ max(standard deviation, √max(mean, 1)). The floor keeps a quiet country from surging on one article. Each z is clipped to ±3 and the index is the weighted mean of the eight — the kinds that decide whether people and operations can stay weigh most, company news least.
| Kind | Weight |
|---|---|
| Regulatory risk | 1.0 |
| Operational risk | 1.0 |
| Stability risk | 1.2 |
| Safety & health risk | 1.2 |
| Corporate risk | 0.6 |
| Financial risk | 0.8 |
| Trade risk | 0.8 |
| Political risk | 0.8 |
What the index reads as
A country has no index until it has 30 days of its own history. The front page's "Where pressure is rising this week" appears once five countries have one, lists the eight highest and names the kind driving each — the largest z. The index compares a country with itself first: +1.0 in Norway and +1.0 in Nigeria mean the same departure from each country's own normal, not the same conditions.
| Level | Index |
|---|---|
| Easing | ≤ −0.5 |
| Normal | −0.5 … +0.5 |
| Rising | +0.5 … +1.5 |
| Surging | > +1.5 |
Evidence
No number without its list. Every level on a hub, every cell of the front-page matrix and every row of the ranking links an evidence page: for one country and one day, the briefing's stories with their kind and severity, then every article counted as a signal, with its outlet, its leaning where known, and the link. Evidence pages are not indexed by search engines; they exist so that a reader can check.
What we never do
We do not forecast. We never write "collapse", "civil war" or "do not go"; the reader reads the curve. We publish no numeric country rating: the levels are words for a count of what the local press reported, and the index measures departure from a country's own normal, not its risk. We do not read a leaning into the population: an outlet's leaning describes the outlet. We do not reproduce article bodies; we link them.
Corrections and contact
A miscounted article, a wrong kind, a wrong severity or a wrong outlet is corrected in the data and the figures are recomputed at the next nightly run. Report it through the contact form; we answer within two working days. The thresholds on this page are the ones in the code: when they change, this page changes with them. The data and the pages are published by K-Software.