Political risk map

This has been one of the interesting topics covered in the March issue of GISMagazine, known in our environment as Geoinformatics. This is a geopolitical map, reflecting criteria that turn constraints for the political, social and economic stability, updated in its 17^th Edition for 2010.

The result is a work of Aon Risk Services, an associate company of Oxford Analytica, based on consultation with over 1000 academics, institutions and individuals related to the monitoring of indicators such as:

• Risk of political instability caused by war, terrorism, coups.
• Interference by other countries in internal political decisions.
• Reliance on remittances or out of control fiscal deficits.
• Problems of the regulatory framework.
• Problems of environmental sustainability.

The ranking of each of these criteria are not detailed, but the results are displayed in a countries thematic map by colors ranging from low-risk category in gray color to very high in red. It is nothing surprising that in North America, Chile and Western Europe, everything looks very friendly, unlike the case of Latin America and the Middle East.

It is possible that some criteria will be questionable, for the view of those who benefit the final result to establish international policies or alerts to foreign investment; but it is no wonder that with the guidelines taken by Colombia it will go this year to have better conditions, Venezuela reaches the peak in red, and increases the risk of El Salvador and Honduras before the recent instability of the latter.

Here you can read the full article and here you can see the map in PDF format. It is required to register an email, but within it can be found other information.

By the way, I recommend take more than a quick look to the magazine, which comes with some interesting topics like:

• What does FME brings for 2010
• Use of GIS for fire control
• There is a super smoked interview with the Business Development Director of 1Spatial about the quality and management of spatial data.
• The Belgian Project inventory of road signs.
• The cadastre and climate change.
• And, the most interesting, a very well worked out article about the Geomarketing.