Bad news for Britain: Scientists rank how 173 countries function – and UK isn’t even in the top 10!

When asked what the best country in the world is, many loyal Britons might be tempted to say Britain.

But scientists have now revealed a less biased version of the truth with 173 countries ranked using a handy political tool.

The Stateness Index was compiled by the German University of Würzburg when researchers tried to discover which countries function most efficiently.

You might be surprised to learn that the UK didn’t even make the top 10, as it placed 13th – just behind the Seychelles and Finland.

On the other hand, Singapore topped the list, followed by Australia and Denmark.

Scroll down for the full list

“We not only measured the formal state, but also looked at the informal side,” says Dr. Theresa Paola Stawski, who worked on the model.

“We see the state in everything around us, for example in the streets, the courts, the police or the schools.”

The Stateness Index accounted for three major data categories over the 72 years between 1950 and 2022.

A country’s law, violence, and overall administration were some of them, while also taking into account everything from doctor wait times to access to electricity.

Different values ​​were then measured and weighted against each other using the ‘V-Dem’ model which is based on the survey responses of more than 3,500 state experts.

Nations were categorized according to their “state” based on these results, ranging from the highest rank of “high functioning” to the lowest of “collapsed.”

Libya, Yemen, South Sudan and Papua New Guinea were among just four countries to receive the title of “collapsed,” with researchers suggesting their public services were severely limited.

The majority (88) were ranked as ‘deficient’ or ‘profoundly deficient’, including Haiti, Somalia and even Cyprus.

While “defective” nations were often politically stable, this was not always the case, as scientists believed their systems to be deeply flawed.

Meanwhile, a total of 81 were found to be “functioning” or “high-functioning,” including a handful of autocracies in which one person has absolute government power.

The US was in this top tier, but was well below Germany, the UK and Spain with a value of 23.

Dr. Stawski claims that these results were quite unexpected for many of the researchers involved.

She told MailOnline: “I was somewhat surprised at how well some autocracies like Singapore or the United Arab Emirates function. This also proves that our Index does not suffer from a (far-reaching) democracy bias.

“On the other hand, I was surprised to learn that Papua New Guinea is effectively a collapsed state, because the disparities in access to public services between urban and rural areas are extreme.”

Even still, Dr. Stawski believes further research is being done area is ‘even more fundamental’ for countries with a lack of human rights and freedom of expression.

“I think state research is still a niche in political science,” she told MailOnline.

“Large-N analysis of state is exacerbated by the paucity of valid, reliable, and transparent, high-quality longitudinal data that accurately measures state.

“But the state is per se the most important political set of institutions – so I’m glad we can contribute to the conceptual and analytical debate on state and state fragility.”