The GINC Nation List

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The Global Institute for National Capability measures and benchmarks nations. Defining a "nation" sets our unit of analysis, and the choice has consequences. Too narrow and the list misses geopolitically significant actors; too broad and the data is diluted by entities whose capability is more meaningfully attributed to a parent or affiliated state.

Defining "nation" relative to "country" or "territory"

The choice of the term nation is deliberate. "Country" is the most common everyday label, but in formal usage it tends to align closely with sovereign statehood, which would force the exclusion of entities whose national capability is genuinely significant, geopolitically sensitive and/or analytically distinct, such as Taiwan. A country-based list cannot accommodate the cases that matter most to capability measurement at the margins of sovereignty.

"Territory" has the opposite problem. It is broad enough to include almost any geographic unit, but it is a purely administrative or geographic descriptor. It does not capture what makes a jurisdiction a meaningful unit of capability analysis: shared identity, language, institutions, history, governance traditions and the cultural and social cohesion that allows a population to act collectively at scale.

"Nation" sits between these two. In political-science, a nation is often defined as a community of people often bound by shared identity and institutions, with the capacity for collective action, whether or not it possesses full international legal sovereignty. This is the right unit for measuring capability, because capability is a property of organised peoples and their institutions, not of legal status alone. It also matches GINC's framing of national capability as a multidimensional phenomenon spanning from domains such as national security and infrastructure to human capital, culture and governance, through to the national economy.

Inclusion Criteria

Our base reference is the ISO 3166-1 standard, which catalogues 249 countries and territories with stable alpha-2, alpha-3 and numeric codes. ISO provides the shared identifier system used by the UN, World Bank, IMF and most national statistical agencies, and gives our data the interoperability needed to combine sources at scale.

Baseline inclusion follows United Nations membership. The 193 UN member states form the uncontested core of the list, joined by the two UN observer states, the Holy See and Palestine. This aligns GINC with the most widely accepted definition of sovereign statehood available.

We additionally include two disputed states, Kosovo and Taiwan, which exercise effective territorial control, maintain the institutions of statehood and attract substantial diplomatic recognition despite being blocked from UN membership. Both are routinely treated as sovereign units by the IMF. This gives GINC a defined universe of 197 nations for national capability analysis.

The remaining 53 entries are non-UN jurisdictions, such as UK territory, French territory or Chinese SAR, or another governance descriptor such as Antarctic Treaty or Disputed territory. Together with the 197 GINC nations, these entries yield a total reference universe of 250 — all 249 official ISO 3166-1 codes plus Kosovo (XKX), which ISO has declined to assign and which is captured here using the user-assigned code adopted by the IMF, World Bank and SWIFT.

The full list is presented in two tables below, split at a population threshold of 1.5 million into 155 nations and 95 small islands and sub-state entities. This threshold aligns with the World Bank and Commonwealth definitions of 'small states' and separates the analytical treatment of larger nations, where comprehensive capability assessment is meaningful, from that of small states, where capability tends to concentrate in fewer domains and methodological interpretation is required.

Figure 1. Nations in GINC's National Capability Framework (population ≥ 1.5 million)

Figure 2. Nations in GINC's National Capability Framework (population < 1.5 million)