KATHMANDU: Nepal is ranked 97th among 128 countries in the International Property Rights Index 2016, published by the Washington DC-based Property Rights Alliance. The report shows that Nepal’s IPRI value increased by 0.3 to a 4.5, placing the Himalayan country 17th in the Asia and Oceania and 97th in the world ranking. PRA said it collected data from 102 think tanks and policy organisations in 70 countries for the analysis. Finland remains in first place in the 2016 IPRI (8.38), followed by New Zealand (8.27), Luxembourg (8.26), Norway (8.25) and Switzerland (8.16). New Zealand shows the highest LP score (9.01), followed by Finland (8.87) and Norway (8.75); while Qatar (8.21), Singapore (8.16) and Norway head the PPR scores, and USA (8.63), Japan (8.62) and Finland (8.59) the IPR ones. Most of the top countries had a high LP score as the strongest IPRI component (though not the case for the U.K. or the U.S.) while the PPR score was less determinative. On average, the complete sample of 128 countries yielded this year an IPRI score of 5.45, the Legal and Political Environment (LP) being the weakest component with a score of 5.13, followed by the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) component with a score of 5.33 and Physical Property Rights (PPR) as the strongest component with a score of 5.87, the report said. At the bottom is the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (2.73) followed by Myanmar (2.76), Bangladesh (2.77), Haiti (2.84), Zimbabwe (3.40), Burundi (3.44), Nigeria (3.56), Pakistan (3.68), Moldova (3.72), Mauritania (3.73), Chad (3.74), Lebanon (3.83), Madagascar (3.84), Ukraine (3.93) and Nicaragua (3.98).