Major credit rating agencies give out the sovereign credit rating of each nation as an absolute grade. How other nations fare over the period under consideration does not matter in a particular nation’s rating score. This is very different from a comparative rating which would tell us...

This paper develops an index for measuring the economic power of governments viewed as entities in themselves. The basic idea is to encapsulate the economic representative power of a nation’s government in the international arena in as simple and parsimonious a manner as possible. For...