GINC Trends follows the slow structural forces that shape national power, prosperity and resilience: 250 trends, from the spread of general-purpose AI to ageing populations, contested sea lanes and the cost of housing. For each one it says what it bears on, where it sits among the others, and how much public attention it is drawing, week by week.
It is made by the Global Institute for National Capability (GINC), an independent non-profit research network and data laboratory that studies the foundation of long-term power, prosperity and resilience.
What it tracks
The 250 trends are spread evenly across the nine capability domains of the National Capability Framework, from Critical Technology to Trade & Investment, which fall into three dimensions: hard, soft and economic. Each trend sits in the one domain it bears on most.
A trend is not an event. A scenario has a date; a trend is what is changing underneath, slowly, and raises or lowers the odds of many events at once.
What it says about each trend
- What it bears on. Every trend is graded against each of the 20 GINC Scenarios on a seven-point scale, from Nil to Critical. A trend graded high against many scenarios is one that much depends on.
- Where it sits. Trends that bear on the same scenarios, share tags or sit in the same domain are linked in a network, whose clusters give the ten themes. Each trend’s rank combines its reach across the scenarios with its place in the network.
- How much notice it draws. Each week, the attention index measures how much people read about a trend on Wikipedia, in 28 languages, and search for it on Google. 100 is the typical trend, so 410 means four times the attention of the typical trend. It is read for the world and 49 countries, and for four regions, eleven sub-regions and 13 blocs of nations, each the average of its member countries.
How to read it
- Home opens with the trends drawing the most attention, and those rising and falling fastest, then the top 25 over time, the domains, the themes and the Leaderboard, with a board for each region, bloc and global shaper.
- Trends lists all 250, ranked and filtered by period, place, domain and theme.
- Each trend’s page gives its attention by place and over time, where its attention comes from, the trends most like it and the scenarios it bears on.
- Network draws the trends as a map of what is linked to what.
- Outlook places every trend on two measures of your choosing, likelihood and impact to start with.
- Index shows which trends are gaining and losing attention in any place, and every trend’s grade against every scenario.
What it is not
Attention is not strength. A trend can deepen for years with little notice, and a single news story can lift attention for a fortnight. The attention index is a prompt to look again, not a measure of how much a trend matters. Nothing in the grades, the network or the ranking uses it.
The site is a draft. The grades come from a panel of AI models working to a written rubric, and the estimates of likelihood and impact are provisional; both are to be replaced by a structured elicitation with experts. The methodology sets out how every figure is made and where each is weak.
Data and licence
Everything on the site can be downloaded: the list, the grades, the network and the weekly attention data for every place. The data is recalculated each week as a new vintage, and earlier vintages are kept. Content and data are published under CC BY 4.0 and code under the MIT licence. Changes are recorded in the change log.
GINC Trends sits beside the Atlas, which rates every nation on 254 capabilities, and the Scenarios, which test what a shock would do to them.