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Using GeoRisk

GeoRisk is the suite's reference dataset: market-entry risk ratings for every economy in the snapshot's universe (218 as at 2026-08-09), seen from Australia. Unlike the three authoring tools it stores nothing of yours and has nothing to edit; you read it, filter it, and export it. Open it at /georisk and you get a world map, headline counts, and a searchable table; click any economy for the full country page. This guide is about reading those pages correctly, because the honest answer to "how risky is Vietnam?" has more moving parts than a single colour suggests.

The scoring method itself (weights, normalisation, sources and licences) lives on the GeoRisk methodology page and is deliberately not repeated here. This page covers what that one doesn't: how to read what you see, and where the traps are.

The shape of the data

Each economy is scored 0–100 (higher is riskier) across seven weighted categories: political stability and governance, economic resilience, financial and currency risk, business environment, security and crime, climate and social compliance, and technology and digital. An eighth lens, cultural distance, is scored and displayed but kept out of the overall rating: it tells you how differently you will need to operate, not how much the market can hurt you. Category scores roll up into one overall score, and the overall score becomes a band.

What a band actually is

The four bands (Low, Medium, High, Very High) are quartiles of the scored cohort, cut at the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles. "High" does not mean the score crossed some absolute line; it means the economy sits in the second-riskiest quarter of the economies that could be scored. Two consequences follow, and both matter:

  • Bands are relative, so they can move without a country's own data changing. If other economies improve, yours can slip a band while nothing about it changed. That is a property of quartiles, not a data error, and it is why every rating is pinned to a named snapshot.
  • Different surfaces band against different cohorts. The overall band ranks an economy against every economy with an overall score (184 in the 2026-08-09 snapshot). Each category band ranks it only against the economies that scored that category, and those cohorts vary a lot: business environment has data for fewer than half the universe, so a "High" there means the riskiest quartile of a much smaller group. The per-indicator "Rating" chips are different again: fixed cuts on the 0–100 score itself, with no re-ranking. Same four words, three derivations. When comparing two economies, compare like against like: overall with overall, category with category.

Coverage, floors, and "Insufficient data"

Every rating carries a coverage percentage: the share of the intended indicator weight that real data actually supplied. GeoRisk never imputes from regional averages; where data is missing, coverage drops and the rating says so. Two floors decide whether a rating is published at all. A category needs at least 60% of its designed weight and two distinct indicators, or it is not scored. The overall rating needs at least five of the seven weighted categories scored and at least 70% weighted coverage, or the economy shows the grey "Insufficient data" pill instead of a band (34 economies in the 2026-08-09 snapshot, mostly micro-states, territories and closed economies), unless the sanctions gate supplies a band on legal grounds alone.

Age matters too. An observation older than its indicator's maximum age (five years for most indicators) is excluded from scoring entirely; between two and five years it still scores but the year is marked ·stale in the indicator table. The "Data source year" column is the reference year of the observation, not when we fetched it, and vintages are heterogeneous by design: survey-based indicators refresh on their own cycles, and the cultural-distance data (a 2004 academic study) is used with a correspondingly long allowed age precisely because national culture moves slowly.

The override pill

Statistics do not capture sanctions. A country can score moderately on its indicators while being legally difficult or prohibited to do business with, so a manual gate sits after the scoring: comprehensively sanctioned economies are set to Very High regardless of their data, and a targeted Australian sanctions framework, severe secondary-sanctions exposure, severed correspondent banking, or a DFAT "Do not travel" advisory floors the band at High. When the gate touches an economy, the country page shows an "Override applied" pill, a banner stating whether the override actually moved the band (often it doesn't: many gated economies already compute at or above the floor), and a three-lens sanctions panel. The computed band is always disclosed alongside, so you can see what the data alone would have said. A few economies carry a band from the gate alone: not enough data to compute a score, but more than enough legal reality to warrant a rating.

Reading a country page, top to bottom

  • The stat row: overall score, percentile of the scored universe, coverage, and the score gap to Australia. The vs-Australia figures are display-only arithmetic on the two scores; they never feed the rating.
  • Category cards: score, band and vs-AU delta per category, with the cultural card labelled "not in overall score".
  • Key risks and considerations: a narrative generated from this snapshot's indicator data by fixed rules. Its own footer says it best: a starting point for analysis, not advice.
  • The indicator table: raw value, 0–100 score, rating chip, and Australia's value for every scored indicator. Note the Australia column shows raw values (a debt ratio, an index level), not scores; don't read it as a score comparison. Rows with a value but a dash for score were excluded for age.
  • Context, not scored: unemployment, trade-agreement status and regional advisories are shown for orientation and never feed the rating.

Snapshots: why the ratings hold still

Everything you see is computed from a frozen, dated snapshot; nothing is fetched live. The scoring engine is deterministic, the pipeline configuration is frozen into each snapshot, and every fetched source artefact is recorded with a content hash, so a snapshot's ratings are reproducible and stable: they change at snapshot boundaries (quarterly by intent, plus out-of-cycle refreshes when sanctions or advisories move), never underneath you. The snapshot id is shown on every page and stamped into every export, so a rating you quote is always a rating as at a date.

Exports

  • Country PDF report: the band, stats, override note, sanctions lenses, category breakdown and full indicator table, with source attribution. Suitable for dropping into a market-entry paper.
  • Country CSV extract: the same content as data, one file per economy.
  • Full extract: the index page's CSV download carries every economy × every indicator in one long-format file, built for pivot tables and Power BI (a ready ingestion kit ships in the repo's powerbi/ folder).

What GeoRisk is not

It is not advice, and it is not a prediction. It is a disciplined, source-attributed summary of public indicators, ranked within one snapshot's cohort, with a legal-reality gate on top. Use it the way you would use any country-risk index: to decide where to look harder, to structure the questions for the people who know the market, and to keep the conversation anchored to evidence with a date on it. The methodology page lists every source, licence and exclusion; if a rating surprises you, the indicator table will show you exactly which numbers drove it.