Asia Power Index
The Asia Power Index is an annual analytical tool produced by the Lowy Institute, an independent Australian foreign policy think tank, that ranks the relative power of 27 countries and territories in the Asia-Pacific region by measuring their resources and influence across eight thematic metrics evaluated through 131 indicators.[1] Launched in 2018, it encompasses states from Pakistan in the west to Russia in the north, extending to the Pacific islands, including major powers like the United States, China, Japan, and India.[2] The Index's eight measures—economic capability, military capability, resilience, future resources, economic relationships, defense networks, diplomatic influence, and cultural influence—combine quantitative data on tangible assets, such as GDP and defense spending, with qualitative assessments of relational and soft power factors, weighted to produce an overall comprehensive power score for each entity.[3] This methodology enables tracking of longitudinal trends, revealing, for instance, the United States' persistent lead in aggregate power (with a score of 100 in the 2024 edition) ahead of China (81.6), whose gains in military capability and economic relationships have narrowed the gap over successive years.[4] The tool has become a reference for dissecting multipolarity in the region, underscoring how alliances, technological foresight, and institutional heft shape influence beyond raw size or spending.[1]Overview
Definition and Scope
The Asia Power Index is a quantitative analytical tool that assesses the relative power of states in the Indo-Pacific region through empirical measurement of both resource endowments and relational influence. Published annually by the Lowy Institute since its inception in 2018, it ranks up to 27 countries and territories, encompassing a broad geographic scope from Pakistan in the west, northward to Russia, and eastward across the Pacific to include Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific island nations.[1][5] At its core, the index tracks resource-based capabilities—such as economic output, military strength, societal resilience, and projected future resources—alongside influence metrics that capture a state's ability to project power through diplomatic engagement, defense partnerships, and economic interdependencies.[6] This dual framework enables a comprehensive evaluation of power distribution, distinguishing inherent capacities from their effective deployment in regional interactions.[7] By focusing on verifiable indicators of power asymmetries, the index aims to illuminate dynamics of multipolarity, great-power competition—particularly between the United States and China—and implications for Indo-Pacific stability, providing policymakers and analysts with data-driven insights into shifting balances of influence.[7][1]Objectives and Conceptual Foundation
The Asia Power Index seeks to deliver an objective, quantifiable assessment of relative state power in the Indo-Pacific region, countering prevalent subjective geopolitical commentaries that often rely on anecdotal or ideologically driven interpretations. By aggregating empirical data across multiple dimensions, the index aims to illuminate the underlying distribution of influence and resources, enabling analysts to discern genuine shifts in power balances rather than unsubstantiated projections of dominance. This approach prioritizes causal determinants of influence, such as a state's ability to project military force or foster economic dependencies, over normative or perceptual metrics that may inflate less tangible elements like cultural appeal.[1][6] Conceptually, the index is grounded in a realist framework that defines power as the capacity to shape the behavior of other actors and events through verifiable advantages in capabilities and networks. It eschews overemphasis on "soft power" constructs, which academic and media sources frequently exaggerate without rigorous quantification, in favor of metrics capturing hard-edged relational dynamics, including defense alliances and trade interlinkages that drive strategic outcomes. This foundation draws from international relations literature emphasizing relative capabilities in regional theaters, where influence stems from material and institutional leverage rather than aspirational ideals.[6] The index's scope encompasses 27 countries and territories across the Indo-Pacific, selected for their potential to affect regional stability, extending from Pakistan eastward to include extraregional actors like the United States due to entrenched alliance structures. Exclusions apply to entities lacking substantive capacity to project influence beyond their borders, ensuring focus on entities engaged in Asia's core strategic competitions. Through annual tracking, it facilitates evidence-based scrutiny of narratives positing unidirectional power transitions, highlighting instead the persistence of countervailing forces amid evolving geopolitical pressures.[1]History and Development
Inception and Launch
The Lowy Institute, an independent Australian think tank dedicated to foreign policy analysis and international security, initiated the Asia Power Index in 2018 to quantify and compare the relative influence of states across the Asia-Pacific amid evolving geopolitical tensions.[1] This effort addressed the shortcomings of predominantly qualitative evaluations, which often lacked standardized metrics for tracking power distribution in a region marked by the U.S.-China rivalry and the diffusion of influence among middle powers.[8][9] The first edition was published in June 2018, establishing a baseline using data from that year to rank 25 countries and territories on their comprehensive power capabilities.[9][8] It highlighted the United States as the dominant actor with an overall score far exceeding others, followed by China, whose rapid gains in military and economic domains were narrowing the gap, while underscoring the roles of Japan and India as key regional players.[9] The index's creation was spurred by post-Cold War realignments, including China's assertive expansion, which had heightened uncertainties and prompted calls for empirical tools to monitor long-term trends beyond anecdotal assessments.[9][8] From the outset, the Lowy Institute prioritized transparency by releasing the underlying datasets publicly, enabling independent verification, methodological critique, and extensions for future research.[1] This approach contrasted with opaque proprietary models, fostering accountability in an era where subjective narratives risked overshadowing data-driven insights into Asia's strategic landscape.[1]Annual Updates and Expansions
The Asia Power Index, launched by the Lowy Institute in 2018, has produced annual editions tracking changes in regional power dynamics, with reports issued for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, and 2024.[1] These updates incorporate accumulating data over multiple years, reaching six years of historical coverage by the 2024 edition, which enables longitudinal trend analysis across its metrics.[5] The 2024 edition marked a key expansion by including Timor-Leste for the first time, increasing the total number of assessed countries and territories to 27 and underscoring Southeast Asia's rising strategic importance amid evolving regional alliances and resource dynamics.[7] This addition reflects ongoing efforts to broaden the index's scope to encompass smaller but geopolitically relevant actors whose influence may grow through economic potential and international partnerships.[10] Methodological refinements have progressed iteratively to enhance accuracy and relevance, such as the 2020 introduction of new indicators measuring major ecological threats, bilateral and plurilateral defense dialogues, and regional perceptions of influence, which aimed to better quantify non-traditional power elements.[11] Subsequent updates included adjustments for real-world shocks, notably a one-time indicator in the 2024 foreign policy sub-measure assessing COVID-19 response effectiveness, alongside refinements to data sources like shifting military expenditure tracking to the SIPRI database for improved comparability.[6] The index also integrates future resources projections—encompassing anticipated economic output, military capabilities, and demographic shifts—to provide forward-oriented insights beyond current snapshots.[12] By 2024, these cumulative enhancements allowed detection of sustained trends, exemplified by Indonesia's overall power score rising 11% from its 2018 baseline, driven by consistent gains in economic capability and defensive capacity amid post-pandemic recovery.[7] Such evolutions prioritize empirical adjustments to capture causal factors like pandemic-induced vulnerabilities and resilience gaps, without altering core weighting structures.[13]Methodology
Theoretical Framework
The Asia Power Index draws on classical realist theories of international relations, particularly the conception of power articulated by scholars such as Hans Morgenthau, defining it as a state's capacity to direct or influence the behavior of other states, non-state actors, and international events through relational dynamics and comparative advantages in a competitive environment.[14] This framework emphasizes tangible capabilities—such as economic and military resources—alongside relational influence derived from alliances and dependencies, rather than intangible or normative elements like soft power ideals that lack verifiable enforcement mechanisms.[6] By privileging causal factors that demonstrably shape outcomes, such as defensive networks enabling deterrence, the index counters idealist approaches that overstate cultural exports or normative appeals without accounting for their limited coercive efficacy in power asymmetries.[14] At its core, the index addresses three fundamental questions guiding the study of power: who holds it, how it changes over time, and what sustains it amid shifting geopolitical conditions.[6] It operationalizes these through an empirical aggregation of resources and influence metrics, prioritizing data-driven comparability via a distance-to-frontier scoring method that benchmarks states against regional maxima, thereby minimizing subjective distortions while incorporating expert-informed weightings validated by sensitivity analyses showing robustness to weighting variations.[6] This method rejects purely normative indices that conflate aspirational factors with realized influence, instead grounding assessments in observable determinants like resilience to coercion, which sustain power through adaptive capacities rather than ideological alignment.[14] Tailored to Asia's geopolitical landscape, the framework incorporates region-specific causal elements, such as maritime domain capabilities critical for controlling sea lanes and countering island-chain vulnerabilities, alongside risks of economic coercion that test relational dependencies in supply chains and trade networks.[14] These adjustments highlight deficits in authoritarian resilience, where centralized control may falter under external pressures without diversified alliances, challenging narratives that undervalue enforcement gaps in non-democratic systems.[6] The result is a realist model that elucidates power transitions driven by material and strategic realities, enabling analysis of how capabilities translate into enduring influence amid Asia's multipolar tensions.[14]Data Sources and Scoring Process
The Lowy Institute Asia Power Index draws on a combination of original research and publicly available data for its 131 indicators across eight thematic measures. Over half of the indicators are derived from proprietary Lowy Institute analysis, including expert surveys and consultations on qualitative aspects such as diplomatic influence and defense networks.[6] The remainder aggregates quantitative data from verifiable international databases, including the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) for military expenditure, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank for economic metrics like GDP in purchasing power parity, UNESCO for cultural and educational indicators, and UN Comtrade for trade flows.[7] This approach ensures reliance on empirical, time-series data, with 99% of points sourced from 2016 onward in foundational methodologies, minimizing imputation to less than 2% of cases via correlated variables or expert estimates where gaps exist.[14] Scores are calculated using a distance-to-frontier normalization technique, which benchmarks each country's performance against the global best and worst performers in Asia for each indicator, yielding comparable values on a 0-100 scale that preserves relative differences without absolute thresholds.[6] These normalized indicator scores feed into 30 sub-measures, which are then aggregated into the eight core themes via weighted averages determined by expert judgment on geopolitical relevance, with adjustments for collinearity (e.g., economic capability and military capability each weighted at approximately 17.5%).[6] The overall power score emerges as a weighted composite of the themes, emphasizing both resources (around 55% total weighting historically) and influence (45%), enabling relative rankings among 27 countries and territories.[14] Annual updates recalibrate scores by refreshing data inputs to reflect recent developments, such as shifts in alliance commitments or perceived coercion in regional networks, while maintaining methodological consistency through peer review, fact-checking, and external audits like those from PwC.[6] Full transparency is provided via downloadable datasets and an online weightings calculator, allowing users to adjust parameters and verify computations against primary sources.[7] This process prioritizes causal linkages between inputs like defense spending trends from SIPRI and outcomes in military capability scores, avoiding over-reliance on potentially biased institutional narratives by grounding in raw, verifiable metrics.[6]Metrics and Indicators
The Eight Core Themes
The Asia Power Index evaluates comprehensive power through eight thematic measures that integrate hard power resources, such as military and economic strength, with soft power elements like diplomatic engagement and cultural projection, to assess a state's capacity to shape regional outcomes via both coercion and attraction. This framework balances tangible assets with relational and resilient factors, recognizing that enduring influence derives from a combination of material capabilities and adaptive networks rather than isolated metrics.[6][1] Economic Capability measures a country's core economic strength, encompassing gross domestic product, trade volumes, technological advancement, and connectivity infrastructure, which provide foundational resources for exerting leverage in Asia.[6] Military Capability assesses conventional armed forces' effectiveness, including defense budgets, personnel numbers, equipment quality, signature technologies like advanced weaponry, and regional deployment posture, as indicators of coercive potential.[6] Resilience evaluates a state's ability to withstand internal and external shocks, incorporating institutional stability, government effectiveness, political cohesion, resource security, and deterrence mechanisms, which highlight vulnerabilities exposed in empirical crises such as economic disruptions or governance failures.[6] Future Resources projects long-term potential through demographic trends to 2050 and anticipated capabilities by 2035, factoring in population dynamics, education investments, and innovation pipelines that signal sustained power trajectories.[6] Economic Relationships gauges influence derived from trade interdependence, investment flows, and economic diplomacy, reflecting how bilateral and multilateral ties amplify or constrain a country's regional clout.[6] Defence Networks examines the robustness of military alliances, partnerships, and interoperability, which enhance collective security and power projection beyond unilateral forces.[6] Diplomatic Influence tracks the breadth of foreign policy tools, including diplomatic postings, multilateral leadership in summits and forums, and aid provision, as means to build coalitions and advance interests.[6] Cultural Influence assesses soft power projection via media exports, educational exchanges, information dissemination, and people-to-people ties, which foster long-term affinity and normative sway.[6]Sub-Indicators and Weighting
The Asia Power Index comprises 131 indicators organized into 30 sub-measures across its eight thematic measures of power.[6] These indicators capture granular aspects of national capabilities and influence, with over half derived from original Lowy Institute research and the remainder from public datasets such as World Bank statistics or SIPRI military expenditure figures.[7] For instance, under military capability, sub-measures include defence spending (e.g., annual military expenditure as a percentage of GDP), armed forces (e.g., total active personnel and reserves), and weapons and platforms (e.g., naval tonnage and combat aircraft inventory).[6] In cultural influence, indicators assess soft power projection through proxies like the number of Confucius Institutes operated abroad versus domestic counter-influence programs in recipient countries, alongside metrics for information flows such as inbound international students and online search trends for cultural exports.[6] Aggregation occurs via a distance-to-frontier methodology, normalizing scores relative to the best and worst performers among assessed countries, followed by weighted averages at each level.[7] At the indicator level, most receive default equal weighting (x1), with discrete adjustments (x0.5 to x2) applied sparingly based on data reliability, regional relevance, and collinearity—prioritizing quantitative metrics like personnel numbers over qualitative assessments unless supported by verifiable relational data, such as alliance commitment indices derived from treaty compliance records.[14] Sub-measures within themes receive non-equal weights reflecting their assessed contribution to the theme, for example, signature capabilities (e.g., ballistic missiles) and weapons platforms carrying higher weight (25% each) in military capability than posture (10%).[14] The eight themes are weighted to total 100%, with resources-oriented measures (economic capability at 17.5%, military capability at 17.5%, resilience at 10%, future resources at 10%) comprising 55% overall, and influence-oriented ones (economic relationships at 15%, defence networks at 10%, diplomatic influence at 10%, cultural influence at 10%) at 45%; these allocations stem from expert consultations emphasizing geopolitical realities like economic interdependence and military deterrence in Asia, rather than uniform equality that might underemphasize hard power factors.[7][14] Sensitivity analyses indicate that moderate weighting variations have limited impact on ordinal rankings due to the breadth of indicators and cross-country disparities.[14] Annual updates account for data lags, with the 2024 index drawing predominantly on 2023 figures for current metrics while incorporating forward projections in future resources—such as extrapolated military spending to 2030 based on R&D investment trends and demographic forecasts—to mitigate temporal distortions without speculative overreach.[7] This approach ensures aggregation remains tethered to empirical trends, with qualitative inputs confined to audited proxies like network reliability scores from defence pact participation data.[6]Rankings
Overall Power Rankings
The Lowy Institute's Asia Power Index for 2024 assesses comprehensive power across 27 countries and territories in the Asia-Pacific region through an aggregated score out of 100, combining capabilities in economic, military, diplomatic, and other domains. The United States maintains the top position with a score of 81.7, reflecting sustained advantages in defense networks and alliances that offset relative economic slowdowns relative to Asian peers.[5][7] China ranks second at 72.7, demonstrating substantial resource mobilization but with gains plateauing in recent assessments due to resilience deficits and external perceptions.[5][7] India secures third place with 39.1, surpassing Japan for the first time through gains in economic relationships and military capacity driven by population scale and defense investments.[5][15] Japan follows at fourth with 38.9, bolstered by diplomatic influence but constrained by demographic and economic stagnation factors.[5][16] Australia enters the top five at 31.9, leveraging strong defense ties and economic completeness amid regional shifts.[5][17]| Rank | Country | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 81.7 |
| 2 | China | 72.7 |
| 3 | India | 39.1 |
| 4 | Japan | 38.9 |
| 5 | Australia | 31.9 |
| 6 | Russia | 31.1 |
| 7 | South Korea | 31.0 |