A Country Schema reads one country against one framework and names the stage it is in, with a probability, its evidence and its history back to 1990. There are eight, each read for the 71 countries of Palanor's sovereign panel. A stage describes where a country sits against its own past and other countries. It is not a rating: no stage is better or worse than another, the colours are one ordered ramp rather than red and green, and no Palanor page sorts countries by a stage.
The eight schemas
- Development stage (W. W. Rostow, with Kuznets and Chenery on structural change): Pre-take-off, Take-off, Drive to maturity, High mass consumption. Read from GDP per person at 2021 prices, the farm and services shares of GDP, the urban share and life expectancy.
- Demographic stage (the demographic transition): High stationary, Early expanding, Late expanding, Low stationary, Declining. Read from birth and death rates, births minus deaths, the fertility rate and the share aged 65 and over.
- Debt cycle stage (Ray Dalio's long-term debt cycle, with Minsky and Reinhart and Rogoff): Early cycle, Leveraging, Late cycle, Deleveraging. Read from private credit and government debt (levels and five-year changes) and interest as a share of government revenue.
- External balance stage (the balance-of-payments stages of Crowther and Kindleberger): Immature debtor, Mature debtor, Debt repayer, Immature creditor, Mature creditor, Credit disinvestor. Read from net exports, net income from abroad, the current account and the net international investment position.
- Export structure stage (Hausmann and Hidalgo's economic complexity; Imbs and Wacziarg): Commodity-reliant, Diversifying, Manufacturing exporter, Complex exporter. Read from the manufactures share of exports, the largest commodity group, the high-tech share and R&D spending.
- Structural pressure (Turchin and Goldstone; Urdal on youth bulges): Low, Building, High, Acute. Read from the youth share of adults, youth unemployment, political stability, interest costs, inflation and organized-violence deaths. Acute needs violence at the level UCDP counts as war.
- Middle-class stage (Kharas, Birdsall, López-Calva and Ortiz-Juárez): Pre-middle-class, Emerging middle class, Middle-class majority, Affluent. Read from the shares living on $10 and $50 a day or more and below $3 a day (World Bank, 2021 prices).
- Electoral cycle (Nordhaus's political business cycle): Post-election, Mid-term, Pre-election, read from how much of the current national electoral term has passed. Calendar only: no parties, candidates, polls or results.
How a stage is read
Each indicator has a published range for every stage, in its own units. A value inside a range counts fully for that stage and less the further outside it falls; the fits become a probability for each stage. Three rules keep the reading honest:
- Withheld when thin. If less than 60% of a schema's indicator weight is published and fresh for a country and year, that reading is withheld, never filled.
- Gates. A strong stage names the evidence it cannot be claimed without (Declining needs deaths to outnumber births; Acute needs war-level violence).
- Hysteresis. A new stage must lead the current one by 15 points before the call changes.
Pre-registered, then checked
The method, every range and a list of known episodes (Japan's demographic decline, Spain's leveraging before 2008, China's middle-class rise, Korea's development path and others) were committed before any reading was computed. A schema publishes stages only if at least two episodes read as expected and hits outnumber misses. Every schema's episode table, misses included, is on its page.
Where to find them
- Schemas: palanor.com/schemas, family Country. Each schema has a country-by-year view, its ranges and its episode check; add ?country=jpn (any ISO code) for one country's reading and evidence.
- Country Dossiers: "Where this country is in its cycles", with each schema's history.
- Signals: `country.<iso3>.schema.<schema>.stage` (the stage number) and `.position` (0 to 1 within the cycle), for charts, Studies, Scenarios and the lattice. Interpretive signals can't be Custom Index components.
- Numen: ask where a country is in its debt cycle, or what stage of the demographic transition it is in.
Sources
World Bank World Development Indicators, Worldwide Governance Indicators and the Poverty and Inequality Platform (CC BY 4.0); IMF balance-of-payments statistics; OECD; UN population estimates via the World Bank; Uppsala Conflict Data Program (CC BY 4.0). Election dates are maintained by Palanor from national electoral commissions, parliaments and constitutions, with a source for each. Palanor calculation.
Related: [Country Dossier](/help/modules/country-dossier) · [Company Posture](/help/signals/company-posture)