What It Is: The Atlantic Council's annual index ranking 171 countries on political freedom, economic freedom, and rule of law (the Freedom Index) alongside income, health, education, environment, and inclusion (the Prosperity Index), using thirty years of data from 1995 to 2025. 

Why It Matters: This year's headline finding is that the rule of law itself is now eroding, not just political freedom — the global Legal Subindex has declined by over a point since 2020, with the US declining from 81.2 to 69.8 since 2014. . Notably, the data shows that rule of law correlates most sharply with prosperity. Having this concrete data can help companies weigh systemic interests more accurately in their public affairs priorities. 

How to Use It: Use the interactive country-profiles rankings to view the US-specific trend line alongside markets where your company operates. against thirty years of rule-of-law, political freedom, and economic freedom data — useful for enterprise risk assessments, issue prioritization, board-level briefings on geopolitical exposure, and crisis readiness. 

This analysis reports how climate change acts as a macroeconomic risk multiplier—exacerbating inflation, supply-chain stress, asset re-pricing, sovereign risk, and financial fragility. It argues that businesses and regulators must treat climate as a cross-cutting systemic issue, not simply an environmental add-on, because the economic implications span sectors, geographies and time horizons.

Anthropic announces a National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council composed of experts in defense, intelligence, government administration, and technology ethics. The council will advise on responsible AI deployment, risk mitigation, interagency coordination, and safeguarding democratic and security institutions amid rapid AI advancement. It reflects rising expectations for accountable AI governance in public-impact domains. 

What It Is: A two-hour, multiplayer leadership simulation from Harvard Business Publishing and Forio in which teams of advisors lead a fictional country through an escalating outbreak crisis, making high-stakes ethical decisions with incomplete information and no established precedent to guide them. 

Why It Matters: The simulation is built specifically to expose the gap between a team's stated values and its actual behavior under pressure — forcing profound disagreement within the team itself, not just against an external threat. That tension mirrors what many public affairs and crisis-communications teams experience when a company's stated commitments meet a fast-moving, high-stakes real-world event. 

How to Use It: Use with public affairs, communications, or executive teams as a low-stakes way to pressure-test how your organization's decision-making process holds up under disagreement and incomplete information, before a real crisis puts those same dynamics to the test. 

This report analyzes how political risk—ranging from regulatory shifts and policy unpredictability to geopolitical tensions—affects corporate valuations, operating costs, supply chains, and long-term investment. It introduces a framework connecting political events to financial consequences, urging companies to integrate political-risk analytics into strategic planning, governance, and ESG-related disclosures to strengthen resilience. 

This report analyzes how political risk—ranging from regulatory shifts and policy unpredictability to geopolitical tensions—affects corporate valuations, operating costs, supply chains, and long-term investment. It introduces a framework connecting political events to financial consequences, urging companies to integrate political-risk analytics into strategic planning, governance, and ESG-related disclosures to strengthen resilience. 

This report explores how geopolitical fragmentation, shifting alliances, and economic realignment are reshaping corporate sustainability strategies. It argues that companies must redesign governance structures, partnerships, and operating models to remain resilient while balancing sustainability commitments with rising political, regulatory, and market uncertainty across regions and sectors. 

This report by BSR explores how a strategic context defined by fragmentation, geopolitical tension, contested information, and uneven economic and social conditions impacts companies' sustainability strategies. As climate impacts, inequality, and technological disruption accelerate, the report argues that sustainability strategies should be sharper, more resilient, and more closely tied to enterprise priorities. 

The authors also argue that business plays a critical role in safeguarding the stable operating environment and bedrock institutions necessary for its success.

This work examines how global capitalism’s democratic foundations are eroding, as inequality, institutional decay, policy capture and corporate dominance erode democratic legitimacy. It argues that corporate-state relations and market structures shape democratic outcomes and that without attention to power, voice and influence, business risks operating in unstable systems of diminishing legitimacy. 

This article examines how the global rise of authoritarian capitalism is reshaping the operating environment for multinational firms. It explores tensions between economic opportunity, political stability, human rights, and democratic governance, arguing that businesses increasingly face strategic and ethical dilemmas when operating within systems where state power and market activity are tightly intertwined. 

What It Is: The World Justice Project's annual Rule of Law Index, drawing on surveys of more than 215,000 households and 4,100 legal practitioners and scholars across 143 countries, scoring each country on eight factors — including Constraints on Government Powers, Absence of Corruption, Open Government, and Fundamental Rights — further broken into 44 sub-factors. 

Why It Matters: The 2025 edition found the global rule-of-law recession accelerating, with 68% of countries declining (up from 57% the prior year). The United States ranked 27th out of 143 countries, falling in seven of eight factors for the third consecutive year and ranking among the ten countries with the largest declines worldwide. 

How to Use It: Use the interactive country rankings to benchmark rule-of-law trends — and the specific factors driving them — in every market where your company operates, useful for enterprise risk assessments and board-level briefings on legal and regulatory exposure.