Country Experts - Greener Relocation Conflict Remoteness Index Review

Recently, I've been getting the same question from my clients: is there a place in the world that is far away from all the geopolitics? While a few answers may seem obvious, the broader picture is not. So, I got tired of answering by intuition and decided to measure it. That's when I remembered my old obsession from the years I taught International Economics at HSE, the gravity equation of trade. In the 1960s, Jan Tinbergen discovered something bizarre: trade flows between any two countries could be predicted almost perfectly by a dead-simple formula: Export ij = GDPi × GDPj / distanceij (in km!) Very "back of the envelope" economic foundation, still this model quickly became the main workhorse of every empricial trade researcher. Yet, for decades, no one could explain *why* it worked. In the 1990s, several economists ‐ Frankel, Wei, Helliwell ‐ tried to crack the puzzle by introducing a "relative remoteness" variable: not just how far you are from your trading partner, but how far you are from *everyone else*, weighted by their economic size. Anderson & van Wincoop eventually showed why those proxies fell short – and gave the decades-long puzzle a proper theoretical foundation. However, for the problem before me, the remoteness logic seemed good enough. So I borrowed the logic and built the Greener Relocation Conflict Remoteness Index. The idea was to assess a countries' relative geopolitical risk through their relative remoteness from conflicts and threats. It's about how far you are from *all* active, and some of the most dangerous possible, conflicts weighted by their severity. As of late April 2026, there wdre 63 active conflicts recorded worldwide. We scored 254 countries, territories, and regions against all of them. The top and the bottom of the ranking are the obvious story: Pacific islands at one end, the Middle East at the other. But the most interesting part is the middle: how countries that may feel equally safe actually differ, and how regions within the same country can vary dramatically from each other. A caveat: this is v1.2. The methodology is transparent, but the results are raw – and some results may surprise you in ways that deserve scrutiny. That's exactly the point. We're planning a series of posts digging into specific findings, edge cases, and counterintuitive results – and we'd love to stress-test the model together with people who know these regions well. Subscribe, follow along, push back. Since Linkedin hates direct links, feel free to drop me a line in DMs or a comment here, and I will share our substack with you.