IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/soinre/v112y2013i2p477-496.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Towards a Multidimensional Measure of Governance

Author

Listed:
  • Shabana Mitra

Abstract

This paper proposes a new index of governance based on the Alkire-Foster methodology and compares it with the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance. The proposed new index improves on existing measures of governance in two ways. First, it is able to incorporate both cardinal and ordinal variables without having to assign cardinal meaning to ordinal variables. The cardinalization of ordinal variables can lead to ambiguous rankings depending on the choice of the cardinal scale. Second, by borrowing the mechanism of cutoffs found in poverty measurement literature, the index can focus attention on nations deprived in terms of governance. The index is computed for the 48 countries of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation’s data. The groups of best-performing and worst-performing nations identified by each of the two methods are largely similar. However, there are some differences among the middle order governance nations. An additional advantage of the proposed methodology is that it involves counting each country’s achievements in the dimensions of governance, which can be presented in a report card of governance. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Suggested Citation

  • Shabana Mitra, 2013. "Towards a Multidimensional Measure of Governance," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 112(2), pages 477-496, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:spr:soinre:v:112:y:2013:i:2:p:477-496
    DOI: 10.1007/s11205-013-0256-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11205-013-0256-4
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s11205-013-0256-4?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Daniel Kaufmann & Aart Kraay, 2008. "Governance Indicators: Where Are We, Where Should We Be Going?," The World Bank Research Observer, World Bank, vol. 23(1), pages 1-30, January.
    2. Foster, James & Greer, Joel & Thorbecke, Erik, 1984. "A Class of Decomposable Poverty Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 761-766, May.
    3. Kaufmann, Daniel & Kraay, Aart & Mastruzzi, Massimo, 2007. "Governance Matters VI: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators, 1996-2006," Policy Research Working Paper Series 4280, The World Bank.
    4. Woods, Ngaire, 2000. "The Challenge of Good Governance for the IMF and the World Bank Themselves," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 28(5), pages 823-841, May.
    5. Sen, Amartya K, 1976. "Poverty: An Ordinal Approach to Measurement," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 44(2), pages 219-231, March.
    6. M A Thomas, 2010. "What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 22(1), pages 31-54, February.
    7. Sabina Alkire, 2013. "Choosing Dimensions: The Capability Approach and Multidimensional Poverty," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Nanak Kakwani & Jacques Silber (ed.), The Many Dimensions of Poverty, chapter 6, pages 89-119, Palgrave Macmillan.
    8. Knack, Stephen & Kugler, Mark & Manning, Nick, 2002. "Second generation governance indicators," MPRA Paper 25029, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 2003.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Saibal Ghosh, 2020. "Access to and use of finance in India: does religion matter?," Indian Economic Review, Springer, vol. 55(1), pages 67-92, June.
    2. Mundle, Sudipto & Chowdhury, Samik & Sikdar, Satadru, 2016. "Governance Performance of Indian States 2001-02 and 2011-12," Working Papers 16/164, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Sabina Alkire & James Foster, 2011. "Understandings and misunderstandings of multidimensional poverty measurement," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(2), pages 289-314, June.
    2. Trani, Jean-François & Cannings, Tim I., 2013. "Child Poverty in an Emergency and Conflict Context: A Multidimensional Profile and an Identification of the Poorest Children in Western Darfur," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 48-70.
    3. José Roche, 2013. "Monitoring Progress in Child Poverty Reduction: Methodological Insights and Illustration to the Case Study of Bangladesh," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 112(2), pages 363-390, June.
    4. Alkire, Sabina & Foster, James, 2011. "Counting and multidimensional poverty measurement," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(7-8), pages 476-487, August.
    5. Sabina Alkire & Yingfeng Fang, 2019. "Dynamics of Multidimensional Poverty and Uni-dimensional Income Poverty: An Evidence of Stability Analysis from China," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 142(1), pages 25-64, February.
    6. Chakravarty, Satya R. & Deutsch, Joseph & Silber, Jacques, 2008. "On the Watts Multidimensional Poverty Index and its Decomposition," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 36(6), pages 1067-1077, June.
    7. Borooah, Vani, 2007. "Measuring economic inequality: deprivation, economising and possessing," MPRA Paper 19422, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    8. Belhadj, Besma & Limam, Mohamed, 2012. "Unidimensional and multidimensional fuzzy poverty measures: New approach," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 995-1002.
    9. repec:pru:wpaper:8 is not listed on IDEAS
    10. Duclos, Jean-Yves & Araar, Abdelkrim & Giles, John, 2010. "Chronic and transient poverty: Measurement and estimation, with evidence from China," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 91(2), pages 266-277, March.
    11. Temple, Jonathan & Ying, Huikang, 2014. "Life During Structural Transformation," CEPR Discussion Papers 10297, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    12. Gaurav Datt & Martin Ravallion, 1998. "Farm productivity and rural poverty in India," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(4), pages 62-85.
    13. Vito Peragine & Ernesto Savaglio & Stefano Vannucci, 2008. "Poverty Rankings of Opportunity Profiles," Department of Economics University of Siena 548, Department of Economics, University of Siena.
    14. Constantine Angyridis & Brennan Scott Thompson, 2016. "Negative income taxes, inequality and poverty," Canadian Journal of Economics, Canadian Economics Association, vol. 49(3), pages 1016-1034, August.
    15. Ye, Yuxiang & Koch, Steven F., 2021. "Measuring energy poverty in South Africa based on household required energy consumption," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    16. Benoit Decerf, 2021. "Combining absolute and relative poverty: income poverty measurement with two poverty lines," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 56(2), pages 325-362, February.
    17. Jean-Michel Hourriez & Bernard Legris, 1998. "L'approche monétaire de la pauvreté : méthodologie et résultats," Économie et Statistique, Programme National Persée, vol. 308(1), pages 35-63.
    18. Paolo Brunori & Francisco Ferreira & Maria Ana Lugo & Vito Peragine, 2013. "Opportunity-sensitive poverty measurement," Working Papers 317, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    19. Ragdad Cani Miranti, 2021. "Is regional poverty converging across Indonesian districts? A distribution dynamics and spatial econometric approach," Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, Springer, vol. 5(3), pages 851-883, October.
    20. M. Azhar Hussain & Nikolaj Siersbæk & Lars Peter Østerdal, 2020. "Multidimensional welfare comparisons of EU member states before, during, and after the financial crisis: a dominance approach," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 55(4), pages 645-686, December.
    21. Espinoza-Delgado, José & López-Laborda, Julio, 2017. "Nicaragua: evolución de la pobreza multidimensional, 2001-2009," Revista CEPAL, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL), April.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:soinre:v:112:y:2013:i:2:p:477-496. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.