Humanitarian intervention index
It's been a few years since I last looked at which countries are ripe for humanitarian intervention. I've made some improvements to the index. Regular readers will remember that what it does is take an index of a country's Human Rights (as in the Observer, where higher is worse), to measure the desirability of intervention, and divides by their military budget, as a proxy for how easy such intervention will be.I've now slightly improved the measure, by taking into consideration the population of the country, so now we have a "collective misery" index, whichi is the HRI multiplied by population (in thousands). The logic here is you're better off rescuing a million people from their misery than 100,000.
Here (apologies to modem users, but really, it is 2005) is the revised table with some key countries and their ranking. Keyboard warriors take note! You can click on it to see the Excel file with the full data
Or here is the full table in lovely html, courtesy of Chris Lightfoot. Just to explain the headings, HRI is the Observer's measure of human rights, the "Collective Misery' index is that multiplied by population (in thousands), defence spending is from 2000 and in $bn, and the HI is collective misery/defence spending/87 (the last being to make the US 100).
Zimbabwe isn't on it as the Observer didn't give them a rating in 2000, perhaps it wasn't considered bad enough. It has a population of 12,000 (000s) and defence spending of 120m, so it's HII will be 1,200 times its HRI. For example if it had an HRI of 10, it would have an HII of 12,000.
posted by Matthew @ 11/01/2005 08:46:00 PM
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