# CIV-R013 Methods Protocol v1.0 Project: CIV-R013 Title: The Civita Optionality Report 2026 Frozen: 14 July 2026 Evidence cutoff: 14 July 2026 Status: frozen for the first public edition ## Research question How did selected citizenship-by-investment and residence-by-investment routes open, reprice, narrow, redesign and close between 1 January 2016 and 14 July 2026, and which changes can be compared without disguising a change in the underlying product? This is a public-record desk-research report. It is not a market census, an option-pricing model, a legal opinion, a causal study, a forecast, or a study of applicant outcomes. ## Definition of optionality For this report, optionality means the continued legal availability of a route to a defined new-applicant profile, together with the qualifying threshold and material obligations required to obtain or preserve the status. It does not measure investor utility, approval probability, processing speed, future asset value or program durability. ## Observation window and panel The observation window begins 1 January 2016 and ends 14 July 2026. The report uses the wording "2016 to July 2026" and does not imply that the full 2026 calendar year was observed. The purposive core panel contains 18 route families: 1. Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship by Investment 2. Cyprus Citizenship by Investment 3. Dominica Citizenship by Investment 4. Greece Golden Visa 5. Grenada Citizenship by Investment 6. Hungary investor-residence routes 7. Ireland Immigrant Investor Programme 8. Malta citizenship-by-investment routes 9. Montenegro Citizenship by Investment 10. Portugal Golden Visa (ARI) 11. Spain Golden Visa 12. St Kitts and Nevis Citizenship by Investment 13. St Lucia Citizenship by Investment 14. Turkiye Citizenship by Investment 15. United Arab Emirates Golden Visa 16. United Kingdom Tier 1 Investor Visa 17. United States EB-5 immigrant-investor route 18. Vanuatu Development Support Program The panel is named and purposive. Counts describe these selected route families and must not be described as the global investment-migration market. Italy's Article 24-bis new-resident tax election is outside the core panel and appears only in a separately labelled HNW mobility-policy appendix. ## Unit of analysis and event taxonomy The unit is one documented material event affecting a legally defined route. A route that existed before the observation window receives a `baseline`, not an invented 2016 opening date. - `baseline`: verified status or price for a pre-window route; - `open`: first acceptance under a genuinely new route; - `option_add`: a qualifying option begins within an existing route; - `reprice`: a threshold changes within a materially continuous option; - `tier`: one threshold becomes geographically or legally segmented; - `option_remove`: one option ends while the broader route remains; - `redesign`: a replacement changes the legal or economic product; - `tighten`: a material eligibility, diligence, presence or maintenance duty increases; - `access_loss`: a third-country travel right is suspended or revoked; - `close`: a route stops accepting new applicants; - `reopen`: a distinct successor starts after a closure; and - `note`: sourced context excluded from analytical counts. Announcements, proposals, judgments, enactments, effective rules and applicant cutoffs remain distinct legal stages. An announced measure is not described as law in force. ## Date rules The analytical date uses the first supportable date in this order: 1. final new-application cutoff or first full day applications are unavailable; 2. legal effective date; 3. enactment or judgment date; or 4. official announcement date when no later controlling instrument is available. Year-only and month-only evidence retains that precision. A source that says a program operated "through 31 December" supports 1 January as the first full unavailable day only when that inference is disclosed. ## Price and comparability rules The historical price measure is the native-currency legal threshold for a defined option and applicant profile. It excludes professional fees, diligence, tax, financing and ancillary charges unless a chart expressly models them. The report does not treat these as like-for-like: - a contribution and recoverable or asset-backed capital; - a single-applicant threshold and a bundled family threshold; - an exceptional conversion or restoration tier and an ordinary geographic tier; - a predecessor and a redesigned successor without an explicit continuity decision; - an annual tax election and a one-time investment; or - a current currency conversion and a historical native-currency amount. For an approved matched pair only: ```text nominal_change_pct = 100 * (amount_after / amount_before - 1) ``` The first edition publishes route-level native-currency cases. It does not publish a global price index, cross-currency ranking, inflation-adjusted market average or "cheapest" table. ## Evidence and editorial review Every public event maps to an official or controlling source, an exact locator, and a durable capture or a clearly labelled verified extract. The 52-row discovery inventory received two independent source-to-field quality-control passes plus automated identity, contradiction, hash and schema checks. Every headline result has a structured claim card naming its event IDs, source IDs, denominator, transformation, limitation and underlying chart table. The publisher must approve the public claim set, inclusion log and rendered release before deployment. The report does not claim peer review, counsel review or independent fieldwork. An interpretation that is not explicit in a controlling source is excluded, labelled unresolved, or presented with its evidentiary limitation. ## Claim gates - No global, market-wide, causal or probability claim. - No trend claim without at least ten matched continuous route series. - Counts name the 18-route panel and their denominator. - Nationality-wide travel-access measures are not attributed only to CBI participants. - Proposed or future measures do not enter effective-event counts. - Processing time, demand, approval probability and applicant outcomes remain out of scope. ## Public artifacts and reproducibility The release includes an accessible HTML report, a versioned PDF, structured claim cards, chart tables, the included-event data, the complete sanitized inclusion log, a source register, this protocol, a recommended citation and a SHA-256 manifest. Official-source captures remain internal unless their redistribution rights are clear. Public data files are released under CC BY 4.0. The narrative, design and source captures remain copyright Civita except where another licence is stated. ## Corrections and change control The frozen methods file, claim set and public artifacts are hashed in the release manifest. A material correction increments the version, identifies the affected claim or row, and regenerates every dependent table. Corrections are also recorded in Civita's public corrections log.