Such reports should drop the idea of ranking countries and instead focus on the rise or fall in per-country scores relative to their previous scores.

Whenever countries are ranked against each other, discussions inevitably focus on the relative ranks and ignore the underlying causes of any drop in scores.

When a country moves up in rank mostly because some other countries moved down, it feels odd to the people there who wonder why they ranked higher without any improvements on the ground. Nationalist governments tend to claim the higher rank is because of their policies, knowing that their people most likely won't study the changes in score components of previous years.

And adding to that, at minimum countries need to be evaluated by their parts. In most of the countries currently at war there are parts were it is relatively safe (but still worse than at peace time), and some parts where it is literally hell. Averaging them all doesn't make sense really.

I feel like that's basically the whole idea of these kinds of reports already: to create a news hook based on shifts in the ranking.