How the jurisdiction tool scores

The principle · you own the weights

The tool never decides what matters. It presents ten decision dimensions; you assign each a weight from 0 to 10. A founder optimising for speed weights differently from one optimising for cost or capital. A fixed editorial composite, where the tool decides clarity is worth 30%, is the anti-pattern this project exists to avoid. No country total is computed until you have declared weights. That is the red line.

Traceability per cell

Every datum is a cell carrying a value (or a gap), its primary source with a direct URL, the date the value is valid for, when it was last verified, a confidence rating, and any caveat.

Coverage, stated openly

How many of the 208 dossier countries carry a real, sourced value for each metric, as of 2026-06-16. The remainder are honest gaps, not zeros.

Source priority

When two reputable sources disagree on a cell, the dataset follows a fixed priority, highest first. A higher tier overrides a lower one; a cell whose only support is tier 4 or 5 cannot carry high confidence.

1. 1Primary law · the statute or official gazette text itself.
2. 2The regulator · the competent authority’s own fee schedules, licensing guidance and registers.
3. 3Official datasets · OECD, UNESCO UIS, Eurostat, the ITU, the World Bank and equivalents.
4. 4Reputable secondary analysis · established law-firm practice guides and recognised industry trackers.
5. 5Press and news archives · to date events, never to source a legal or numeric value.

The ten dimensions

Within each dimension a subset of subfields is scored; the rest are descriptive, shown to you but not fed into the maths. A dimension’s score is the mean of its available scored subfields, with equal sub-weight · sub-weighting would reintroduce hidden editorial judgment. A gap subfield is excluded from the mean.

Absolute anchor scales

Each scored numeric metric maps onto a fixed, published 0 to 100 scale · scored against a real-world range, not min-maxed across the countries on screen. best scores 100, worst scores 0, clamped. A few metrics that span orders of magnitude (space VC, ecosystem composite, graduates, headcount) use a log scale so a mid-sized ecosystem is not crushed to near zero because one or two giants exist.

Relative min-max made a country’s score move when a peer was added or removed, and sank a genuine extreme (the United States on fee size or VC volume) for being the extreme rather than for being worse. An absolute anchor gives a stable, defensible number.

Categorical metrics use an explicit value-to-score map (full foreign ownership: yes 100 / restricted 50 / no 0; operator liability: limited 100 / unlimited 35). Secondary-sanctions risk is shown as context but deliberately not scored · a subjective rating is kept out of the maths.

The country total

Summed over the ten dimensions; a dimension you weight 0 drops out entirely. Because the scales are absolute, a country’s score is independent of the set on screen · adding or removing a comparator never changes another country’s number. Under equal weights the United States scores ~71.6 (11th of 58); France, Portugal and Finland lead on genuinely fast, cheap, open and treaty-complete regimes.

Gap handling and hard filters

You may set knockout rules (exclude any country without a comprehensive space law); filtered countries are removed before scoring and listed separately with the reason. If, for any dimension you weighted 7 or higher, more than 40% of its scored subfields are gaps, the country is badged “insufficient data for your profile” · it still appears with its partial data, but is held out of the ranked shortlist rather than scored on thin evidence.

Coverage and review tiers · named, honest

Each profile carries an honest tier. Reviewed means a named space-law reviewer has signed it (their name, role and date appear in the tool). Researched · not yet expert-reviewed is the 58-country core: sourced, dated and confidence-rated across all ten dimensions, but not yet signed by an external expert. Skeleton covers a further 45 economies on three officially-sourced pillars only · UN treaty status (UNOOSA), OECD FDI openness and corporate tax · with every venture-specific dimension an explicit gap; they are scored only on those pillars, always flagged provisional, and never rank among the researched set. No profile is fabricated as “reviewed” · inventing a reviewer’s name would breach the anti-fabrication rule. The mechanism exists so that, when a real practitioner signs a flagship jurisdiction, their name appears.