Country profiles
One score, and the reasons behind it
Each scored country carries a single number reflecting how strongly the conditions that enable forced labor are present across its economy and institutions. The profile breaks that number into its parts and states plainly where the country sits, how confident the read is, and where the data run thin.
Validated structure · scores read in tiers The scoring structure passed its pre-registered validation suite (see methodology); the scores shown here are condition estimates with uncertainty bands, read in tiers. The breakdown reports the two phase components that combine into the score and the per-domain risk circles beneath them.
Origin-side scope. This score reflects a country’s own structural conditions. It does not yet capture destination-side sponsorship systems (such as kafala tied legal status), so known migrant-destination countries (including the Gulf) can score lower than their documented forced-labor risk. Read a low score there as “not yet measured,” not “low risk.” More.
How to read a profile
The score runs from 0 to 1. A higher number means more of the enabling conditions are present together, not that more people are in forced labor, which the index does not attempt to count. The two components shown are the vulnerability that exposes people to recruitment (R) and the conditions under which exploitation can run unchecked (E); the published score is their geometric mean. The third part of the frame, the financial conditions that let proceeds disappear, informs the intervention map rather than the published risk score in this build.
Where a country’s data are too thin to rank it fairly, it is left unscored rather than assigned a misleading number. Of the roughly 195 countries in scope, 184 are scored.
Why read the tier, not the exact rank?
The top and bottom of the table are stable: under repeated testing with small amounts of noise, the highest-risk countries keep roughly 87 percent of their positions and the lowest-risk roughly 80 percent. The middle of the table is not: scores there are densely packed, so a country ranked 80th and one ranked 90th are barely apart and could swap under tiny measurement changes. Reporting a precise mid-table rank would imply a confidence the data do not support. So countries are banded into Higher / Middle / Lower tiers and the band is what should be read, which is what the validation actually supports.
Why is a country sometimes grey (not scored) instead of a number?
Eleven countries do not have enough underlying data to clear the coverage floor: the minimum share of indicators needed for a defensible score. Rather than fill the gap with a guess or a zero (which would falsely read as "low risk"), they are left unscored and shown in grey. A missing input is never silently treated as zero anywhere in the index; where too little remains, the honest answer is "this cannot be ranked fairly yet," and the site says so.
Where the conditions are strongest, and weakest
The countries at the top of the index are those where vulnerability, weak enforcement, and financial opacity hold together most strongly. Those at the bottom are the settled, well-governed economies where these conditions are largely absent.
The highest observed score is near 0.66; the lowest near 0.11. The scale’s theoretical worst of 1.0 is anchored to a maximum rather than to the worst country observed, so even the highest-risk countries sit well below it.