Kälin and Kochenov's Quality of Nationality Index: Part One: Laying down the Base

This paper is the introduction to the QNI, aiming to show the avenues of demystifying the concept of citizenship through the use of data. Kälin and Kochenov's Quality of Nationality Index (QNI) ranks the objective value of all nationalities as legal statuses of attachment to states. Using a wide variety of strictly quantifiable data to gauge the opportunities presented and limitations imposed by nationalities on their holders, the QNI provides a comprehensive ranking of the intrinsic quality of each citizenship status in the world. Both the internal value (economic opportunities, human development and peace and stability) and the external value (including the number and quality of visa-free travel and, crucially, settlement destinations) of all the nationalities in the world are measured, only to reveal the reality that the quality of nationalities is not correlated with the prestige of the issuing states. The full dataset of the index is available on Mendeley.

The QNI is an invaluable tool to illustrate the huge discrepancies in the value of the nationalities of the world: showcasing first-hand the unequal distribution of rights and opportunities which different nationalities bring to their holders.

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