Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2017 March 8

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March 8

Top 500 most important bilateral relationships

As a side project I'm thinking of creating an index to rank the world's top 500 most important bilateral relationships of the almost 40,000 that exist between UN member states. I don't have a precise definition of "important" other than to refer to the common sense of the word in this context. My encyclopedic question is what kinds of data are available and would make a fitting contribution to ranking countries? Trade volume between countries first comes to mind. Foreign direct investment too (but that's more difficult to sort data as offshore jurisdictions muddle the figures). More creatively the number of times in the past 10 years that the word "conflict" appears in a news article about the two countries out of the total number of articles mentioning the two countries in that same period as queried from a news database? Any other ideas? Also could subjective evaluation contribute to such an index?

Muzzleflash (talk) 12:48, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Other commonly used measures would be number of visitors from country A to country B; number of foreign students and/or other temporary residents; amount of development assistance; number of high-level visits (may be more difficult to find figures on those). --Xuxl (talk) 14:30, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Geographic distance is certainly important, particularly for small nations, as 2 small nations which border each other will almost certainly have more interaction than 2 on the other side of the world from each other. Of course, this stat causes the stats you really care about, so you might skip measuring this stat and just go on to measuring the final stats, unless you need to use this stat to filter out the unlikely candidates (distant, small nations). StuRat (talk) 15:12, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

For trade This report from the WTO has lots of good statistics, including major bilateral trade partnerships and the volumes traded. --Jayron32 15:21, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

All really good contributions thanks. Something that is very hard to measure is what allies some countries have and how committed those allies are to protecting their friends / clients / vassals. Like using the proposed data would not allow for the Armenia - Azerbaijan relationship to make the top 500 but that conflict could draw in Russia and Turkey in a a war.

Often mentioned conflicts make a relationship more important for the world. The most often mentioned possible conflicts make relationships extremely important. Is there a simple mathematical formula that would give much more weight to the most frequently mentioned possible conflicts in news articles over the past 10 years? Muzzleflash (talk) 18:01, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Sure..., if only we could catch international politics and potential conflicts into a simple mathematical formula... Jahoe (talk) 01:06, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

There are also collaborative bilateral relationships of a military nature. The UKUSA signals intelligence collaboration between the US National Security Agency and the UK GCHQ goes back to World War II. In general, the United States and the British Commonwealth collaborate on many military activities (the Five Eyes intelligence collaboration can be considered a US-Commonwealth collaboration). Australia and New Zealand also collaborate militarily on occasion (as late as 2006 in East Timor) as the ANZAC forces. loupgarous (talk) 22:21, 9 March 2017 (UTC)