2010 Commitment to Development Index Is Out

Yesterday, CGD launched the 2010 edition of the Commitment to Development Index, which since 2003 has ranked rich countries on how much their policies help or hurt less fortunate nations.Yes, I have been at CGD that long. Julie Walz, Cindy Prieto, and Paolo Abarcar, who poured many hours into the 2010 edition, have not been around nearly so long. Possibly, they weren't born yet in 2003.The standings at the top and bottom hardly changed from last year. Sweden came first again, followed by Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway. South Korea, the newest entrant, placed last, not far behind its neighbor Japan. The U.S. moved up because of the troop surge in Afghanistan, a military operation which is backed by NATO and a U.N. Security Council vote in 2001 and thus is counted in the CDI's security component. (Complicated issue, I know.)The CDI relies heavily on contributions from Theodore Moran of Georgetown University; Jeanne Batalova at the Migration Policy Institute; Keith Maskus at the University of Colorado; and Jason Alderwick and Mark Stoker, who are based at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.I am really proud of the web site this time around. The latest improvements came about in response to usability testing we commissioned earlier in the year. Check out the animated Flash-based application, developed by Mapping Worlds. Please do your own usability testing and tell me what you think.From the FAQ:

6. Did the way the CDI is computed change much between 2009 and 2010?
In a few ways. The environment component now adds the carbon dioxide (CO₂) equivalent of fossil fuel production to emissions of CO₂ from fossil fuel consumption and other activities. This gives weight to the role of rich countries in extracting fossil fuels as well as burning them. The migration component now rewards immigration from poorer countries, such as Haiti, more than from richer ones such as Serbia. The intellectual property rights (IPR) section of the technology component gained two new indicators: one on whether countries allow patent applications to be challenged before they are officially approved, which discourages companies for claiming ownership of ideas already in the public domain; and one on whether patent exceptions are provided for research purposes, increasing access to such innovations in developing countries.