There remains no internationally agreed-upon definition of state fragility, but this hasn’t stopped several institutions from attempting to measure it.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which defines a fragile state as a country with “weak capacity to carry out basic governance functions, and lacks the ability to develop mutual constructive relations with society,” uses the “harmonized averages” from the World Bank and the rankings from the Fund for Peace to monitor official development assistance to fragile states. Bilateral donors usually turn to the World Bank assessment, while social science researchers generally cite the Center for Systemic Peace’s index to measure the characteristics of a country’s political regime.
While OECD acknowledges that such lists are not used to define fragile states, it does note that measures of fragile states are helpful tools because they monitor countries using specific indicators and flag areas that warrant further research.