Asia Power Index: Lowy Institute’s 8 Measures, Power Tiers and India’s Rank

The Asia Power Index is the Lowy Institute’s annual ranking of how much power 27 countries and territories hold in Asia, scored out of 100 on what they have and what they do with it. The Sydney-based think tank first published it in 2018. Its latest edition, for 2025, puts the United States first with 80.5 points, China second with 73.7 and India third with 40.0, which takes India back over the 40-point line the index uses for a major power.

Two readings of that result go wrong. The first treats the Asia Power Index as a military table, when military capability is 1 of 8 measures and carries 17.5% of the weight. The second reads India’s third place as closeness to the top two, when India sits 33.7 points behind China and Lowy’s own analysis says the capability gap between them has widened. This note settles both: what the index actually counts, and what India’s 40.0 does and doesn’t mean.

What Is the Asia Power Index?

The Asia Power Index is a composite index: one score built from many smaller indicators, the way a report card’s percentage is built from marks in each subject. Lowy defines power as a state’s capacity to shape the choices of other states and the course of events around it. The index then tries to measure that capacity country by country, inside one region.

Two things in that table decide how you read every result. The tiers are score bands, so rank and tier can disagree: India ranked 3rd in 2024 with 39.1 and was still a middle power. And every score is relative to the other 26, which the next section explains.

How Does the Asia Power Index Measure Power?

It averages 8 measures, each with its own weight, into one comprehensive power score. Four measures count resources, meaning what a country has. The other four count influence, meaning what it does with those resources in Asia.

Each measure bundles 3 to 5 sub-measures, and those hold 131 indicators in all. More than half the data points come from Lowy’s own research; the rest are drawn from hundreds of public national and international sources. Some indicators are hard counts, such as GDP at purchasing power parity or the number of embassies a country runs. Others are expert judgments gathered by survey, such as how well a leader advances the country’s economic interests abroad, an economic statecraft indicator added in the 2025 edition.

The eight measures and their weights

Here’s the full set, with the weight Lowy assigns to each:

Add the weights by type and resources carry 55% of the score against 45% for influence. Military capability begins with money spent, which is why India’s rising defence budget feeds the index directly, but the measure also weighs combat experience, platforms and how quickly forces can deploy in an Asian conflict. The weights themselves are Lowy’s choice, a point the section on limits returns to.

Distance to frontier, and India’s 40.0 worked out

Every indicator is scored on a distance-to-frontier basis. The best performer in the set sits at 100, the worst at 0, and everyone else falls in between in proportion to their raw values. The method follows the OECD’s handbook on building composite indicators. It lets GDP and embassy counts sit on the same scale, but it also means a score is always relative. A country can grow in absolute terms and still lose points if the leader grows faster.

Here is how India’s 2025 score comes together. Multiply each measure score by its weight:

The products add up to 40.03, which rounds to the published 40.0. Notice where the points come from: India earns about 24.2 from the 4 resource measures and only 15.8 from the 4 influence measures. Hold on to that split, because the power gap is built on it.

Superpower, Major Power, Middle Power: What the Tiers Mean

The tiers are fixed score bands, not categories borrowed from international relations theory. A country’s band depends only on its comprehensive power score:

• superpower: 70 points or more;
• major power: 40 points or more;
• middle power: 10 points or more;
• minor power: below 10 points.

In 2025 the bands sorted the 27 like this:

• Superpowers: the United States and China.
• Major power: India alone.
• Middle powers: 15 countries and territories, from Japan (38.8) down to Brunei (10.6).
• Minor powers: 9, from Cambodia (9.5) down to Papua New Guinea (4.6).

Because the bands are fixed, a 1-point move can change a label. Japan and India shared major power status in the first edition. By 2021 Lowy wrote that both fell just short of the 40-point threshold. India climbed back above it in 2025 while Japan, at 38.8, did not. The label is a line on a ruler, so it is wise to read the score next to it every time.

The power gap

The power gap is the index’s second look at the same data. Lowy plots each country’s resource score against its influence score and fits a trend line through them by linear regression. That line gives an expected power for any level of resources, and the gap is the distance between a country’s actual result and that expectation. A positive gap means a country gets more influence out of its resources than the trend predicts. A negative gap means it gets less.

Think of two students with the same books and study hours. One converts them into a rank well above what those inputs predict; the other falls short. The analogy breaks at one point: a student’s marks are absolute, while every score here is relative to 26 others, so the trend line itself moves from year to year.

In 2025 Japan had the largest positive gap, +11.3, turning an expected 27.5 into an actual 38.8, and Lowy describes it as a smart power. India’s actual 40.0 sat against an expected 44.0, a gap of -4.0. That placed India 25th of 27, and the index’s India profile calls it the country’s largest gap to date. Only Russia (-6.8) and North Korea (-8.2) did worse.

How Has India’s Rank Changed Since 2018?

India has ranked 4th or 3rd in every edition. It slid below the major power line in the early 2020s, then climbed back from 2023, overtaking Japan for 3rd place in 2024 and crossing 40 points in 2025.

One caution before you memorize these. The figures come from the index’s historical data as it stands today, and that back-series has been revised since first publication. The 2018 report printed India at 41.5 and Japan at 42.1, while the current series shows 41.1 and 42.8 for the same year. Compare India across years within one series, and don’t mix a number from an old report with a number from the current platform.

The dip and the recovery have causes that Lowy’s reports name:

• 2021: Lowy found the region had become more bipolar and less multipolar during the pandemic, with Japan and India each losing more ground that year than China.
• 2024: India overtook Japan for 3rd place with 39.1 points, still inside the middle power band.
• 2025: India’s economic and military capability both rose. Lowy says the military gains came mostly from better expert appraisals, likely influenced by Operation Sindoor in May 2025.
• 2025: India rose to 9th for economic relationships, its first rise on that measure, after overtaking China as the second-largest destination for 10-year cumulative investment, behind the United States.

Where India Is Strong and Where It Lags

India’s resources rank near the top of Asia; its influence doesn’t. Read the worked table by rank and the pattern is plain. India is 3rd or 4th on every resource measure and on diplomatic and cultural influence, but 9th on economic relationships and 11th on defence networks, 2 measures that carry a quarter of the weight between them.

Defence networks is built around alliances. Its first sub-measure, the regional alliance network, scores:

• codified security guarantees;
• allied forces deployed in other index countries;
• joint training, combined operations and arms purchases with allies.

India has no treaty ally in the region, by the design of a foreign policy that prizes strategic autonomy. A measure built this way will rank India below smaller states that do have allies, and in 2025 the Philippines and Thailand both overtook it. Groupings such as the Quad are dialogues rather than alliances, so they are best read as counting under defence diplomacy, where they weigh less. That is a feature of the yardstick as much as a verdict on India.

Economic relationships asks how much other Asian economies depend on a country as a buyer, a seller and an investor. Lowy notes that India’s trade ties within the region did not improve in 2025 even as investment inflows did. Its overall reading is that India’s own power is rising slowly while a gap remains between ambition and influence, particularly relative to China. Lowy also found no improvement in how experts rated the regional or global leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and suggested, tentatively, that multi-alignment and a Global South focus are not an automatic route to more influence.

Why the Index Matters, and Where It Falls Short

The Asia Power Index is the most detailed public attempt to put numbers on power in Asia, and it is still one institute’s model. Both halves of that sentence matter in an answer.

Its strengths are real:

• It separates resources from influence, which forces the question every foreign ministry asks: what are we getting for what we have?
• It is transparent. Indicators, weights and sources are published, and an online calculator lets any reader reweight the measures and re-rank the countries.
• It runs from 2018, so the direction of change is often more telling than any single year’s rank.

Its limits, most of them stated by Lowy itself:

• The weights are a judgment. Lowy says they reflect the collective judgment of its experts, drawn from academic literature and consultations with regional policymakers, and it accepts that others could weigh the measures differently. Its sensitivity analysis holds that the data move the rankings more than the weights do.
• Some inputs are opinion. Asian military posture, foreign policy and economic statecraft come from expert surveys. Lowy notes that the 2025 survey of US leadership was taken before the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire, which shows how timing can shape a perception score.
• The frame is Asia. It ranks power within one region, so influence a country holds elsewhere doesn’t count.
• Relative scoring hides absolute gains. Under distance-to-frontier, a country can improve and still slip.
• A point of view. The project sits in Lowy’s Engaging Asia Project, set up with Australian government funding. That is worth knowing when the analysis turns to what results mean for Australia; it isn’t evidence that the numbers are biased.

What no index of this kind can capture is how a state behaves under pressure: the quality of its decisions in a crisis and its public’s willingness to bear costs. Those decide wars and negotiations, and they reach 131 indicators only after the fact.

How the Index Links to Other Indices and Ideas

The Asia Power Index sits in a family of composite rankings that turn up across the syllabus, and each measures something different:

• The Global Peace Index ranks how peaceful countries are. A large military can lower a country’s peace score and raise its power score at the same time.
• The Human Development Index measures health, education and income for people, not a state’s reach abroad.
• The Global Hunger Index tracks undernutrition and child mortality, a reminder that a major power on Lowy’s scale can still carry large domestic deficits.

Conceptually, the index is a modern attempt at comprehensive national power, the idea that a state’s strength is the sum of many capacities rather than its army or its economy alone. Its cultural influence measure is the closest thing it has to soft power, the pull a country exerts through its culture and ideas. The index also puts numbers on the older debate over whether Asia is turning bipolar or multipolar, which the note on the changing balance of power takes up in theory.

The Asia Power Index Today

As of September 2026, the 2025 edition is the latest on the index’s website. It covers 27 countries and territories, up from 25 in 2018, with Papua New Guinea added in 2020 and Timor-Leste in 2024. Lowy framed its 2025 results around 7 findings:

• the United States loses ground;
• China gains advantage;
• India reaches major power status;
• Russia resurges;
• status quo Japan;
• Southeast Asia’s winners and losers;
• Australia faces challenges.

The United States still leads, but its score fell 1.2 points, the largest drop of any country, as surveyed experts marked down its foreign policy. China rose 1.0 point and recorded the highest diplomatic influence score any country has posted in the index. The gap between the 2 superpowers narrowed to 6.8 points, while the gap between China and India remains about 5 times that.

For India, the finding that matters most is the one Lowy states plainly: the capability gap with China has widened even as India crossed 40, which Lowy calls a long-term challenge to India’s vision of a multipolar order. The note on India-China relations covers the bilateral side of that gap, and several 2025 findings, from Japan’s leadership churn to Russia’s rebound, bear on India’s Indo-Pacific strategy. The rankings are the Lowy Institute’s assessment, not an official Indian or multilateral statistic, so quote them as Lowy’s finding.

How to Study the Asia Power Index for Exams

The index belongs to GS Paper II, International Relations, where it serves as evidence on India’s rise, its relations with China and the effect of other countries’ policies on India’s interests. It is also useful in GS Paper IV answers on national power, in essays on India’s place in the world and in the PSIR optional’s section on the balance of power.

Prelims tends to test indices by publisher and by what they measure; International Relations accounts for 104 of the 1,403 questions in the site’s Prelims question bank. Mains questions in this area ask about the thing the index measures rather than the index itself. Mains 2024 GS Paper II asked candidates to explain the statement “The West is fostering India as an alternative to reduce dependence on China’s supply chain and as a strategic ally to counter China’s political and economic dominance.” Mains 2020 GS Paper IV asked candidates to “Discuss the role of ethics and values in enhancing the following three major components of Comprehensive National Power (CNP)“, which is the same idea the Asia Power Index quantifies.

Revise these facts:

• Publisher: the Lowy Institute, Sydney; first edition 2018; no 2022 edition.
• Coverage: 27 countries and territories in 2025, up from 25 in 2018.
• Structure: 8 measures, 30 sub-measures, 131 indicators; resources carry 55% of the weight and influence 45%.
• Tiers: superpower 70+, major power 40+, middle power 10+, minor power below 10.
• 2025 top four: United States 80.5, China 73.7, India 40.0, Japan 38.8.
• India: 4th from 2018 to 2023, 3rd since 2024, a major power again in 2025, power gap -4.0, weakest on defence networks (11th).

Three confusions trip up most readers. Keep the publisher straight: this index is Australian, and it is not a UN product. Keep rank and tier apart: 3rd place in 2024 still meant middle power. And keep the sign of the power gap straight: a negative gap means influence below resources, so India’s -4.0 is underperformance relative to its own potential, not a penalty.

Treat the Asia Power Index as evidence, not a verdict. Its most useful number for India isn’t the 3rd place but the -4.0 power gap, because it names the job ahead: turning a large economy and military into partnerships and influence. An answer that makes that point, with the 40-point line and the gap to China beside it, will stand apart from one that only quotes a rank.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about the Asia Power Index: 1. It is published by the Lowy Institute. 2. It was first published in 2018. 3. It ranks countries only on their military capability. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 1 and 2 only
• (c) 2 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (b) Military capability is only 1 of 8 measures, carrying 17.5% of the weight.

2. In the Asia Power Index, a country with a comprehensive power score of 40 or more but below 70 is classified as a:

• (a) superpower
• (b) major power
• (c) middle power
• (d) minor power

Answer: (b) The index’s bands are 70+ superpower, 40+ major power, 10+ middle power and below 10 minor power.

3. Consider the following statements about India in the Asia Power Index 2025: 1. India ranked 3rd, ahead of Japan. 2. India’s lowest-ranked measure was defence networks. 3. India had a positive power gap. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 1 and 2 only
• (c) 2 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (b) India’s power gap was -4.0, meaning its influence trailed its resources.

4. Which one of the following is NOT one of the eight measures of the Asia Power Index?

• (a) Resilience
• (b) Future resources
• (c) Cultural influence
• (d) Human development

Answer: (d) Human development is measured by UNDP’s Human Development Index, not by the Asia Power Index.

5. Consider the following pairs (Index : Publisher): 1. Asia Power Index : Lowy Institute 2. Global Peace Index : Institute for Economics and Peace 3. Human Development Index : World Bank. Which of the pairs given above is/are correctly matched?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 1 and 2 only
• (c) 2 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (b) The Human Development Index is published by the UNDP, not the World Bank.

Mains

1. “China is using its economic relations and positive trade surplus as tools to develop potential military power status in Asia.” In the light of this statement, discuss its impact on India as her neighbour. (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2017, GS Paper II.
2. The Asia Power Index separates what countries have from what they do with it. Using India’s power gap in the 2025 edition, discuss why India’s influence in Asia trails its resources. (15 marks, 250 words)
3. “A ranking built on assigned weights and expert surveys measures perceptions of power as much as power itself.” Critically examine this statement with reference to composite indices such as the Asia Power Index. (15 marks, 250 words)
4. India’s strategic autonomy keeps it outside formal military alliances. Examine the costs and benefits of this choice for India’s standing in the Indo-Pacific. (10 marks, 150 words)
5. Is Asia becoming bipolar rather than multipolar? Discuss with reference to the relative power of the United States, China, India and Japan. (15 marks, 250 words)