Country risk indices provide quantitative and qualitative assessments of the political, regulatory, governance and corruption risks that affect mining investment decisions. They range from mining-specific frameworks (Fraser Institute Policy Perception Index, Behre Dolbear, MineHutte) to broader governance and corruption indices (World Bank WGI, Transparency International CPI, Heritage Foundation) used as supplementary inputs. This directory lists the principal indices with primary-source links to their methodology documentation.
Alphabetical by organisation name.
The Fraser Institute's Annual Survey of Mining Companies, now in its 27th edition, is built from primary survey data rather than desk research: the 2025 edition was circulated to approximately 2,304 mining and exploration executives between 5 August and 26 November 2025, drawing 256 responses from companies that reported combined exploration spending of US$4.2 billion in 2025, and was published on 26 February 2026 covering 68 qualifying jurisdictions (Fraser Institute, Annual Survey of Mining Companies 2025). The headline Investment Attractiveness Index (IAI) combines two sub-indices: the Best Practices Mineral Potential Index, which rates a jurisdiction's geologic attractiveness assuming an ideal policy environment, weighted at roughly 60%, and the Policy Perception Index (PPI), a composite “report card” on 15 policy factors — regulatory uncertainty, environmental rules, taxation, political stability, infrastructure, labor regulation, security, and geological database quality — weighted at roughly 40%, with the exact split (58.3%/41.8% in the 2025 edition) recalculated each year from a survey question asking respondents to weigh the two factors themselves (Fraser Institute, Annual Survey of Mining Companies 2025). A jurisdiction needs a minimum of five responses to be ranked at all, a threshold that determined which 68 of the surveyed regions qualified in 2025 (Canadian Mining Report, Top 50 Mining Jurisdictions in the World).
Behre Dolbear, a mining-industry advisory and engineering firm, has compiled its own country ranking since 1999 using a fundamentally different design philosophy: geology and mineral potential are explicitly excluded, and the ranking is qualitative rather than quantitative, drawing on the firm's own operating experience across more than 50 countries each year, confidential corporate sources, and reference material from the Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom and Transparency International (Behre Dolbear, Ranking of Countries for Mining Investment). The survey scores 25 countries across seven weighted criteria — economic system, political system, social issues affecting mining, permitting delays, corruption, currency stability, and tax regime — each rated 1 to 10, for a maximum composite score of 70 points (Behre Dolbear, Ranking of Countries for Mining Investment). Historically, Behre Dolbear's top tier has consistently clustered around Canada, Australia, the United States, Chile, and Mexico, while the bottom has clustered around Russia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bolivia, and Papua New Guinea, with Venezuela and Zimbabwe excluded entirely in some editions because the firm judged their risk too extreme to be meaningfully scored (Mining.com, Canada, Australia, US, Chile and Mexico, the Top Destinations for Mining Investors). A recurring finding across Behre Dolbear editions is that the United States has repeatedly tied for the worst permitting-delay score in the world, alongside Papua New Guinea, reflecting 7-to-10-year federal permitting timelines even as the US scores near the top on economic system, political system, and anti-corruption criteria (Mining Engineering Online (SME), U.S. Tied for Having Worst Permitting Process — Again).
The PRS Group's International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), published monthly since 1984, takes a third approach: a 32-variable composite spanning political risk (12 weighted components on a 100-point scale), financial risk (five components, 50 points), and economic risk (five components, 50 points), combined via the formula CPFER = 0.5 × (PR + FR + ER) into a single composite score from 0 to 100, with bands from “Very Low Risk” (80–100) to “Very High Risk” (0–49.9) (PRS Group, The ICRG Methodology). Unlike Fraser or Behre Dolbear, ICRG is not mining-specific — it is a general sovereign risk model licensed across finance, insurance, and corporate treasury functions, with mining investors typically overlaying it on top of a commodity-specific index. That commodity-specific niche is filled by Fitch Solutions' (BMI) Mining Risk/Reward Index, covering 62 markets and deliberately overweighting “Rewards” (60% of the final score, versus 40% for “Risks”) on the premise that industry size and growth potential matter most to long-run investment decisions even in higher-risk frontier markets; the Risks half of the score blends BMI's own Long-Term and Short-Term Economic Risk Indices, a Political Risk Index (averaging Governance, Society, and Security Risk pillars), and an Operational Risk Index covering labor markets, trade and investment, logistics, and crime and security (Fitch Solutions (BMI), Mining Risk/Reward Index Methodology). S&P Global Market Intelligence occupies adjacent territory with country-level risk scores covering 211 countries and territories across six aggregate and 22 sub-aggregate risk categories on a 12-month forward-looking, relative 0–100 scale, feeding directly into S&P Global Ratings' corporate methodology for mining and metals issuers, where country risk is assessed by mapping a company's fixed-asset and EBITDA location against the sovereign score (S&P Global Marketplace, Country Risk Dataset; S&P Global Ratings, Key Credit Factors for the Metals and Mining Upstream Industry).
On the Investment Attractiveness Index for the 2025 survey year, the top five jurisdictions globally were Nevada, Ontario, Saskatchewan, South Australia, and Arizona, with Nevada moving up from second place in 2024 on the strength of a perfect 100-point Policy Perception Index score — up from 4th place on policy the prior year — combined with a 4th-place mineral potential ranking (Mining Connection, Nevada Claims Top Spot in Fraser Institute's 2025 Global Mining Survey). Ontario's jump from 15th place in 2024 to 2nd in 2025 was the single largest move in the top tier, and Saskatchewan's rise from 7th to 3rd gave Canada two of the top three jurisdictions worldwide (Nasdaq, Ontario Ranks Second Globally, Overtakes Saskatchewan in New Fraser Mining Survey). Rounding out the top ten were Western Australia, Botswana, Norway, Sweden, and, notably, Saudi Arabia at 10th — the only Asian jurisdiction in the top ten and a 13-place jump from 23rd in 2024, driven by a 19.8% year-on-year improvement in its Policy Perception Index score (Argaam, Saudi Arabia Moves Up to 10th Globally on Mining Investment Attractiveness). At the bottom, China ranked dead last at 68th on both the overall IAI and the Policy Perception Index alone, with Burkina Faso, Egypt, the Philippines, and Mali filling out the remainder of the bottom five (Canadian Mining Report, Top 50 Mining Jurisdictions in the World).
One year earlier, the 2024 survey (based on 350 company responses across 82 jurisdictions) had produced a different leaderboard: Finland ranked first — up from 17th in 2023 — followed by Nevada (2nd, its second consecutive top-two finish), Alaska (3rd, up from 11th), Wyoming, and Arizona rounding out the top five (Fraser Institute (via Tsodilo Resources), Annual Survey of Mining Companies 2024); (PR Newswire, Finland Tops Annual Global Mining Survey Rankings, Ethiopia Ranks Last). The bottom five in 2024 were Ethiopia (last), Suriname, Niger, Nova Scotia, and Mozambique, with the Republic of Ireland topping the Policy Perception Index alone that year on a perfect 100 score after ranking just 15th on policy in 2023 (Fraser Institute, Annual Survey of Mining Companies 2024). The year-over-year contrast between Finland's 2024 top ranking and its absence from the 2025 top five (while still scoring well on policy) illustrates how sensitive these composite rankings are to relatively modest shifts in respondent sentiment given the small number of survey responses per jurisdiction — a methodological limitation the Fraser Institute itself partially addresses through the five-response minimum threshold but does not eliminate.
Because Behre Dolbear excludes geology and Fraser blends it in at 60% weight, the two indices frequently diverge sharply on resource-rich but policy-challenged jurisdictions. Botswana is the clearest example of convergence: it ranked 2nd globally on Fraser's 2025 Policy Perception Index (up from 14th in 2024) and has historically scored well on Behre Dolbear's political-risk-only criteria too, making it one of the few African jurisdictions both methodologies treat as genuinely low-risk (Fraser Institute, Annual Survey of Mining Companies 2025). Mali, Burkina Faso, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, by contrast, consistently anchor the bottom of both Fraser's Policy Perception Index and Behre Dolbear's composite score, reflecting a rare point of methodological agreement despite the different scoring philosophies (Canadian Mining Report, Top 50 Mining Jurisdictions in the World). Fitch Solutions' Mining Risk/Reward Index, by deliberately overweighting Rewards (60%) over Risks (40%), produces yet a third pattern: frontier markets with poor governance scores but very large untapped reserves — the kind of profile common across parts of West and Central Africa — can score more favorably on the BMI index than on Fraser's Policy Perception Index alone, precisely because BMI's methodology is explicitly designed to surface opportunity in markets where “regulatory frameworks are not as developed” (Fitch Solutions (BMI), Mining Risk/Reward Index Methodology).
Mining-focused insurers apply country risk information differently than equity investors do. Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance's mining underwriting practice, for example, explicitly avoids a formal published risk index in favor of jurisdiction-specific legal-predictability analysis, arguing that “jurisdictional issues are more important than considerations around the regional mining industry itself” because claims-paying certainty depends on how predictably a given legal system applies insurance-contract terms, not on a jurisdiction's abstract political-risk score (WTW Mining Risk Review 2023, interview with Matthew Gooda, Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance). The same review notes that mandatory mine-closure periods in certain jurisdictions materially affect business-interruption exposure calculations, and that aggregation risk — whether multiple insured assets in one region face correlated loss potential — is assessed separately from any single-country risk score (WTW Mining Risk Review 2023). This underscores a broader pattern: insurers and reinsurers treat country-risk indices as one input among several, layering proprietary claims data (in BHSI's case, a historical loss dataset exceeding US$7 billion, in which business interruption accounts for roughly 70% of losses despite being a minority of insured value) on top of published rankings rather than underwriting directly off them.
S&P Global Ratings treats country risk as a formal, weighted input into every mining and metals corporate credit rating, mapping a company's fixed-asset locations and EBITDA generation against its sovereign country-risk assessment, which itself spans “the broad range of economic, institutional, financial market, and legal risks that arise from doing business in a specific country” (S&P Global Ratings, Key Credit Factors for the Metals and Mining Upstream Industry). Within S&P's broader corporate methodology, mining is classified as a “moderately high-risk” industry (category 4) based on high cyclicality and intermediate competitive risk, and a company's competitive-position score weights operating efficiency at 50%, scale/scope/diversity at 35%, and competitive advantage at 15% for the “Commodity Focus/Cost Driven” profile assigned to most rated miners (S&P Global Ratings, Key Credit Factors for the Metals and Mining Upstream Industry). This is a materially different use case than the Fraser Institute or Behre Dolbear surveys, which inform exploration and greenfield-investment decisions; S&P's country-risk overlay instead directly moves bond and loan pricing for existing producers, making it arguably the ranking family with the most direct and immediate capital-markets consequence.
All of these indices share structural weaknesses that sophisticated users of the data explicitly flag. Fraser's minimum five-response threshold per jurisdiction means some ranked regions rest on a very small number of survey answers, which can produce the kind of large year-over-year swings seen with Ontario (15th to 2nd) and Saskatchewan (7th to 3rd) in a single cycle (Nasdaq, Ontario Ranks Second Globally, Overtakes Saskatchewan in New Fraser Mining Survey). PRS Group's ICRG explicitly separates its risk assessment into components rated on subjective analysis (political risk, based on qualitative expert judgment) versus objective data (financial and economic risk, based on measurable indicators), a transparency about methodology that is itself somewhat rare in the space (PRS Group, International Country Risk Guide Methodology). Behre Dolbear's own report acknowledges its rankings are “qualitative, not quantitative,” drawing on the firm's institutional experience rather than a reproducible statistical model (Behre Dolbear, Ranking of Countries for Mining Investment). The practical effect of this proliferation of differently-weighted, differently-sourced indices is that no single number functions as an industry-wide consensus score — capital allocators, insurers, and rating agencies each default to whichever index's methodology most closely matches their specific decision (exploration siting, claims underwriting, or credit spread), and cross-referencing multiple indices remains standard due-diligence practice rather than a sign of any one index's inadequacy.