INDEX · RELEASE 2025Q4 · REFERENCE YEAR 2024
TSRI-C · Tensile Sovereign
Resilience Index (Core)
Debt is not the risk. Debt servicing is. TSRI-C measures the structural capacity of 22 sovereign states to keep financing themselves under stressed conditions — from official sources only, with nothing estimated and nothing interpolated.
What the index measures
Sovereign analysis is dominated by one statistic: debt to GDP. It is easy to compute and deeply misleading in isolation. Japan has carried debt above 200% of GDP for a generation while financing itself at some of the lowest yields on record; several emerging economies have lost market access below 50%. What separates them is not the size of the debt but the capacity to service and refinance it without losing the confidence of creditors.
TSRI-C is built around that capacity. Debt-to-GDP contributes just 6% of the composite. Interest payments measured against government revenue — the purest expression of fiscal pressure — carry 16%.
Four pillars, thirteen indicators
| Pillar | Weight | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Fiscal sustainability | 40% | Can the state service its debt out of its revenues? |
| Monetary credibility | 30% | Is the currency a reliable store of value, backed by a credible central bank? |
| Structural resilience | 25% | Do growth, demographics and institutions support long-run debt capacity? |
| Strategic reserves | 5% | Does the state hold politically neutral reserve assets as a final buffer? |
Pillar scores combine by weighted geometric mean, so weakness in one pillar cannot be fully offset by strength elsewhere — which is the profile of most historical crisis states in their final pre-crisis years. Gold sits deliberately at 5%: a tail-risk buffer, not a thesis.
The 2024 ranking
| Sovereign | TSRI-C | Band | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Norway | 69 | Low |
| 02 | Switzerland | 67 | Low |
| 03 | Germany | 58 | Moderate |
| 04 | Saudi Arabia | 58 | Moderate |
| 05 | South Korea | 57 | Moderate |
| 06 | Australia | 54 | Elevated |
| 07 | Canada | 54 | Elevated |
| 08 | France | 51 | Elevated |
| 09 | Indonesia | 49 | Elevated |
| 10 | Japan | 46 | High |
| 11 | China | 46 | High |
| 12 | Italy | 44 | High |
| 13 | United Kingdom | 43 | High |
| 14 | United States | 43 | High |
| 15 | Türkiye | 40 | High |
| 16 | Brazil | 38 | High |
| 17 | South Africa | 36 | Critical |
| 18 | Russia | 36 | Critical |
| 19 | India | 33 | Critical |
| 20 | Mexico | 32 | Critical |
| 21 | Argentina | 26 | Critical |
| — | Singapore | — | Insufficient data |
Singapore is withheld rather than scored: its fiscal source coverage falls below the 75% publication floor. Declining to publish a number is the correct outcome when the data does not support one.
Risk bands are derived, not chosen
The five bands come from Jenks natural-breaks clustering of 413 scored country-years over 2005–2024, then version-frozen: 62.3 / 54.1 / 46.5 / 37.7. Scores within 2.0 points of a cut are flagged as borderline, because classification granularity should never be mistaken for score precision.
Why the numbers hold
Before any ranking publishes, it is re-scored under weighting schemes we did not choose. Two of those tests are blocking: if the country ordering does not survive them, nothing is published.
| Test | Result | Status |
|---|---|---|
| PCA re-weighting | ρ 0.956 | Blocking gate · passed |
| ±5pp weight perturbation | ρ 0.984 | Blocking gate · passed |
| Entropy weights | ρ 0.808 | Diagnostic · disclosed |
| Equal pillar weights | ρ 0.688 | Diagnostic · disclosed |
Under the original rules all four comparisons were blocking, and two failed. Rather than adjust the result, we reviewed the gate and documented the outcome: entropy weighting conflates dispersion with information, and equal pillar weights re-inflate a gold pillar we deliberately hold at 5%. Neither is a weighting anyone defends, so neither carries a veto — but both are published at every release, disagreement included.
The index reads history
Scored back to 2005 on the same frozen scale, the index tracks known episodes: the United Kingdom falls from 52 to 38 into the 2022 gilt crisis, Türkiye descends from 61 to 40 through its currency crisis, and Argentina sits at the floor of the scale. The index describes structural resilience; it does not forecast events.
Sources and known limitations
IMF World Economic Outlook · World Gold Council / IMF IFS · UN World Population Prospects · Romelli CBI-Extended · World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators.
- No external-balance or market-pricing pillar. Deferred to TSRI Extended; sovereigns with exceptional external assets — Norway, Switzerland, Singapore — are understated relative to the full framework.
- Argentina is withheld for 2017–20. The IMF published no Argentine CPI after censuring the country's statistics, and the no-partial-window rule refuses the five-year inflation transforms.
- Governance indicators are perception-based and move slowly; the index will be late to institutional deterioration that has not yet reached survey respondents.
- Reference year lags the release by one year, matching the IMF WEO vintage.