What is the Elcano Global Presence Index?
The Elcano Global Presence Index (IEPG after its initials in Spanish) is a synthetic index that orders, quantifies and aggregates the external projection of different countries in the economic, military, scientific, social and cultural realms.
Why compile it? With the IEPG, the Elcano Royal Institute is now one of the academic bodies, international organisations and think-tanks that are attempting to conceptualise globalisation and the capacity of countries to shape that process through their international positioning in different spheres of activity.
At the theoretical level, the debate has focused on the world’s new post-Cold War balances, on the rise of emerging powers in an economy that is increasingly interdependent or on more complex concepts of power in international relations, which include so-called soft elements. There have also been attempts to operationalise and compare countries in certain dimensions linked to these phenomena –such as, for instance, economic openness and competitiveness, commitment to development or the reputation of the image they project–. But so far there has been no overall, aggregate measure of the international positioning of countries in the globalised world, and this is the omission the IEPG seeks to remedy. The exercise is based on an integral logic that takes into account a wide range of fields such as the economy, defense, migration, science, culture and development assistance.
What is the IEPG’s purpose?
Since the IEPG will be calculated yearly and for more than 50 of the world’s most important countries, it will allow international and cross-time comparisons of global presence. It is thus a useful tool for:
- Analysing global trends in international presence (the evolution of multipolarity and bipolarity, the rise or decline of certain powers and regions, the greater or lesser role of ‘soft’ as opposed to ‘hard’ power, etc).
- Examining the foreign policy of the countries for which the index is calculated (assessing their efforts in relation to their results, analysing their presence by sector, studying the relation between presence and actual influence, etc).
For which countries is the IEPG calculated?
The IEPG covers the global presence of a selection of 54 countries, among which are the 42 nations with the largest GDPs (including all G-20 members) as well as those not in that category on account of the size of their economies but which are members of the OECD and/or the European Union.
Argentina |
Czech Republic |
Iran |
Netherlands |
South Africa |
Australia |
Denmark |
Ireland |
New Zealand |
South Korea
|
Austria |
Estonia |
Israel |
Nigeria |
Spain |
Belgium |
Finland |
Italy |
Norway |
Sweden |
Brazil |
France |
Japam |
Porland |
Switzerland |
Bulgaria |
Germany |
Latvia |
Portugal |
Thailand |
Canada |
Greece |
Lithuania |
Romania |
Turkey |
Chile |
Hungary |
Luxembourg |
Russia |
United Kingdom |
China |
Iceland |
Malaysia |
Saudi Arabia |
United States |
| Colombia |
India |
Malta |
Slovakia |
Venezuela |
Cyprus |
Indonesia |
Mexico |
Slovenia |
|
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