Political stability and the rule of law are always key considerations when engaging in bilateral or multilateral international partnerships. This is also true in the case of hydrogen and Power-to-X.
There are multiple country rankings covering different aspects of political stability or fragility. Examples are the Fragile States Index, the Global Peace Index, or the Freedom and Democracy indices.
It is however important to remain critical of the methodologies behind those rankings. They are often based on explicit or implicit value judgements that can easily lead to biased results. Here, one can refer to Campbell’s Law, which states that when a quantitative social indicator is widely used in decision-making, it becomes susceptible to corruption pressures, distorting the perception of the realities, the indicator intends to reflect.
One example is the World Bank’s “Doing Business” Index. Its conceptual design and methodology are criticised for making autocratic, authoritarian regimes appear “easier” to do business with, because they abandon social safeguards, lower taxes or suppress trade union activities. In 2020, the World Bank discontinued its Doing Business reporting because of data manipulations that would have benefited some countries to the detriment of others.
