National Capability. GINC's Emerging National Assessments
Mapping the global capability frontier across nine strategic domains
- 🇺🇸 United States, 🇸🇬 Singapore, and 🇨🇭 Switzerland dominate the National Capability Framework, occupying the Capability Frontier in 8, 7, and 6 capability domains respectively.
- 🇮🇱 Israel, 🇸🇪 Sweden, and 🇰🇷 South Korea are the only other nations on the Capability Frontier across each of the hard, soft, and economic capability pillars.
- GINC’s Capability Frontier methodology makes trade-offs explicit, revealing patterns of specialisation and structural gaps that are often obscured by aggregate indices.
GINC’s mission is to measure national capability, with a primary focus on identifying the Capability Frontier, the nations that lead indigenous generational capability across the nine domains of the National Capability Framework, spanning hard, soft, and economic capability.
Figure 1 identifies the frontier nations across each of the nine capability domains, while Figure 2 presents the top 20 nations in our emerging assessments, based on a lexicographic ranking (similar to an Olympic medal tally), that prioritises nations dominating the Capability Frontier (analogous to Olympic gold medals) across these domains.
Figure 1. National Capability Domains by Frontier Nations
| Capability | ABBREV | Frontier Nations - T1 | T2 | T3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hard Capability | ||||
| Critical Technology | CT | 🇺🇸 | 6 | 2 |
| Strategic Infrastructure | SI | 🇨🇳🇨🇭🇫🇮🇯🇵🇰🇷🇳🇱🇳🇴🇸🇬🇸🇪🇦🇪🇺🇸 | 3 | 2 |
| National Security | NS | 🇮🇱🇺🇸 | 3 | 3 |
| Soft Capability | ||||
| Human Capital | HC | 🇨🇭🇪🇪🇮🇱🇸🇬🇺🇸 | 4 | 2 |
| Information Influence | II | 🇩🇰🇫🇮🇯🇵🇰🇷🇳🇱🇳🇴🇸🇬🇸🇪🇨🇭🇦🇪🇺🇸 | 8 | 1 |
| Governance Integrity | GI | 🇨🇭🇩🇰🇪🇪🇫🇮🇮🇱🇳🇴🇸🇬🇸🇪 | 3 | 2 |
| Economic Capability | ||||
| Financial Strength | FS | 🇫🇷🇩🇪🇸🇬🇸🇪🇬🇧🇺🇸 | 6 | 4 |
| Production & Innovation | PI | 🇨🇭🇮🇱🇰🇷🇸🇬🇸🇪🇺🇸 | 3 | 4 |
| Investment & Trade | IT | 🇨🇭🇪🇪🇮🇱🇰🇷🇸🇬🇺🇸 | 4 | 4 |
Source. GINC Data Laboratory, January 2026
The emerging assessment uses synthetic simulation to develop a capability rating for each nation across approximately 250 discrete capabilities. These capability ratings are aggregated into capability group scores. Using Pareto domination analysis, countries are then assigned to tiers within each domain, with Tier-1 (the frontier) identifying nations that are not dominated by any peer in that specific capability area.
Across the nine domains, countries are then ordered lexicographically, prioritising the number of Tier-1 frontier positions, followed by Tier-2, Tier-3, and subsequent tiers. This approach deliberately emphasises frontier presence, rewarding nations on the capability frontier in at least one domain, while maintaining a consistent and transparent ordering across the full tier structure.
This methodology offers a clear advantage over aggregate index approaches, which often obscure structural gaps and patterns of specialisation. By contrast, the Capability Frontier framework makes these trade-offs explicit, providing a more faithful representation of comparative national capability.
Figure 2. National Capability Tiers by Domain, Ordered Lexicographically by Frontier Performance
| Hard Capability | Soft Capability | Econ Capability | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Posn | Nation | CT | SI | NS | HC | II | GI | FS | PI | IT |
| 1 | 🇺🇸 United States | T1 | T1 | T1 | T1 | T1 | T3 | T1 | T1 | T1 |
| 2 | 🇸🇬 Singapore | T4 | T1 | T4 | T1 | T1 | T1 | T1 | T1 | T1 |
| 3 | 🇨🇭 Switzerland | T2 | T1 | T5 | T1 | T1 | T1 | T2 | T1 | T1 |
| 4 | 🇮🇱 Israel | T2 | T2 | T1 | T1 | T2 | T1 | T3 | T1 | T1 |
| 5 | 🇸🇪 Sweden | T2 | T1 | T4 | T2 | T1 | T1 | T1 | T1 | T2 |
| 6 | 🇰🇷 South Korea | T2 | T1 | T3 | T2 | T1 | T2 | T2 | T1 | T1 |
| 7 | 🇫🇮 Finland | T4 | T1 | T5 | T2 | T1 | T1 | T3 | T2 | T3 |
| 8 | 🇪🇪 Estonia | T7 | T3 | T5 | T1 | T2 | T1 | T3 | T2 | T1 |
| 9 | 🇳🇴 Norway | T4 | T1 | T4 | T3 | T1 | T1 | T2 | T3 | T3 |
| 10 | 🇳🇱 Netherlands | T2 | T1 | T4 | T3 | T1 | T2 | T2 | T2 | T2 |
| 11 | 🇩🇰 Denmark | T5 | T2 | T5 | T2 | T1 | T1 | T2 | T2 | T2 |
| 12 | 🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates | T5 | T1 | T4 | T4 | T1 | T2 | T2 | T2 | T2 |
| 13 | 🇯🇵 Japan | T3 | T1 | T3 | T4 | T1 | T3 | T2 | T2 | T2 |
| 14 | 🇩🇪 Germany | T2 | T2 | T4 | T4 | T1 | T4 | T1 | T3 | T3 |
| 15 | 🇨🇳 China | T2 | T1 | T2 | T3 | T2 | T4 | T3 | T2 | T2 |
| 16 | 🇫🇷 France | T3 | T2 | T2 | T4 | T2 | T5 | T1 | T3 | T3 |
| 17 | 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | T4 | T3 | T3 | T4 | T2 | T4 | T1 | T4 | T4 |
| 18 | 🇹🇼 Taiwan | T6 | T4 | T5 | T5 | T3 | T4 | T4 | T2 | T2 |
| 19 | 🇦🇺 Australia | T5 | T3 | T4 | T4 | T2 | T3 | T3 | T4 | T4 |
| 20 | 🇮🇪 Ireland | T5 | T3 | T8 | T5 | T2 | T4 | T4 | T3 | T3 |
Source. GINC Data Laboratory, January 2026
