About
Composite indices earn trust by showing their work
The world runs on composite indicators: development indices, transition scores, resilience rankings. Decisions and budgets move on them. And yet most are built in spreadsheets: weights chosen once and forgotten, gaps filled silently, "higher is better" assumed rather than declared, benchmarks that are labels instead of calculations.
Indicator Gateway exists because we think the instrument should be as rigorous as the analysis it supports. A composite index has real methodology in it (normalization, orientation, weighting, estimation, benchmarking), and every one of those choices should be explicit, user-owned and visible wherever the number appears.
So that's what we built: a unified layer over twenty-two global statistical sources, a portfolio engine that treats an index as a weighted, direction-aware composition of indicator × country holdings, a builder for the indicators that don't exist yet, and a read-only API that serves the same numbers to your own tools. Nothing in the pipeline is silent. Interpolated cells say so. Stale vintages are flagged. Sub-annual data carries its annualization rule. Progress is stated in index points since a base year, never dressed up as returns.
What we hold ourselves to
Three commitments
Honest labels
If a number was estimated, inverted, rebased or annualized, the label says so. The formula you read is the calculation that ran.
Your methodology, not ours
We don't publish rankings and we don't pick your weights. The platform supplies the machinery and the discipline; the judgment stays yours, recorded in an activity trail.
Sources credited
The data belongs to the institutions that collect it. We pass every provider's series through with attribution, licenses and definitions intact, from the World Bank and IMF to V-Dem and the Global Carbon Project, and we link back to the source.
The data
Standing on public statistics
The platform reads from twenty-two global sources on one common axis. The World Bank's development, ESG, governance, gender, health and financial-inclusion databases and its Poverty and Inequality Platform. IMF World Economic Outlook forecasts. The UN's SDG Global Database, DESA population estimates and projections, UNHCR refugee statistics and UNICEF child-wellbeing data. UNDP Human Development indices, UNESCO education and science statistics, ILOSTAT labour markets. FAO food security and water accounts (FAOSTAT and AQUASTAT). Climate Watch emissions, Ember electricity and the Global Carbon Budget. V-Dem democracy indices, ND-GAIN climate vulnerability, UCDP conflict data, SWIID inequality, Penn World Table and Maddison long-run growth, and the WIPO Global Innovation Index. Alongside this indicator layer we operate a trade and tariff data plane read from customs authorities and statistical offices directly: applied tariff schedules for eighteen jurisdictions, bilateral trade flows, and the official documents behind tariff actions. Its licences are listed in full at attributions. Together: 18,000+ indicators and 14 million observations across 200+ economies, with history to 1750 and projections to 2050. All of it is open data, passed through with attribution (licences listed in the Terms). Custom indicators extend the catalogue with your own compositions, and further sources (such as OECD or Eurostat datasets) are onboarded for Enterprise plans with frequency and orientation handling reviewed case by case.
The founder
A note from Muaz Notiar
"Most of the work in indicator analysis is not analysis. It is pulling series from scattered sources and lining them up. We take that part away, so the hours go where the judgment is." Muaz Notiar · Founder, Indicator Gateway
I have spent 20 years in the financial services industry, and much of that time on ESG and economic indicator projects. The same pattern repeated everywhere: serious decisions resting on composite numbers whose weights, gaps and definitions lived quietly in someone's spreadsheet.
Indicator Gateway is the instrument I kept wishing existed on those projects, so I built it.
Muaz Notiar
Founder
Connect on LinkedIn ↗Working on something the world measures?
We'd like to see the index you'd build.