Young boy leads chants at Feb. 5, 2011 solidarity rally for democracy in...

Where is the next upheaval?

Where is the next upheaval?

The shoe-thrower's index The Economist

Feb 10th 2011  from PRINT EDITION

BY PUTTING together a number of indicators that we believe feed unrest,and ascribing different weights to them, we have come up with a chart of Arab countries’ vulnerability to revolution. Some factors are hard to quantify and are therefore discounted; the data on unemployment, for example, were too spotty to compare. The chart below is the result of ascribing a weighting of 35% to the share of the population that is under 25; 15% to the number of years the government has been in power; 15% to both corruption and lackofdemocracy indices; 10% for GDP per person; 5% for an index of censorship and 5% for the absolute number of people younger than 25.