The International Impact Index is created based on objective and publicly available data. The data for the creation of the Index comes from the following sources: 1) International Statistics; 2) International organizations; 3) Domestic statistics; 4) Data collected and processed by national institutions; 5) International Databases ; as well as 6) Media monitoring.

For the needs of the index, presence is identified in three dimensions: economic, political and soft, or cultural, presence which are composed of variables of different nature. Therefore, the index is useful in revealing not only the presence of the mentioned countries in North Macedonia, but also in determining the nature of the mentioned presence.

The index answers the question: to what extent and in what form are the states “present” on the territory of North Macedonia, regardless of whether they exert real influence or demonstrate power? In a sense, presence can be the basis of power – a platform or means of enabling presence to be transformed into influence or power – if the demonstrating state is capable of achieving such goals.

The main goal of the project is to contribute to the conceptualization of globalization and Europeanization and to the understanding of foreign policy. Therefore, one of the functions of the Index is to analyze the trends of presence, the rise or fall of certain countries and the greater or lesser importance of the soft versus the other two forms of presence. The index is also a way of assessing the foreign policy of those countries involved in the calculation – the effort and means versus the results, the profile of presence by sector, the relationship between presence and influence, or the distance between objective presence and subjective perception.

The International Impact Index observes the following countries:

Additional information on Methodology can be found in the Report on International Impact Index at www.prepsa-institute.mk