IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/applec/v41y2009i12p1513-1523.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Noncompensatory/nonlinear composite indicators for ranking countries: a defensible setting

Author

Listed:
  • Giuseppe Munda
  • Michela Nardo

Abstract

Composite indicators (or indexes) are very common in economic and business statistics for benchmarking the mutual and relative progress of countries in a variety of policy domains such as industrial competitiveness, sustainable development, globalization and innovation. The proliferation of the production of composite indicators by all the major international organizations is a clear symptom of their political importance and operational relevance in policy-making. As a consequence, improvements in the way these indicators are constructed and used seem to be a very important research issue from both the theoretical and operational points of view. This article aims at contributing to the improvement of the overall quality of composite indicators (or indexes) by looking at one of their technical weaknesses, that is, the aggregation convention used for their construction. For this aim, we build upon concepts coming from multi-criteria decision analysis, measurement theory and social choice. We start from the analysis of the axiomatic system underlying the mathematical modelling commonly used to construct composite indicators. Then a different methodological framework, based on noncompensatory/nonlinear aggregation rules, is developed. Main features of the proposed approach are: (i) the axiomatic system is made completely explicit and (ii) the sources of technical uncertainty and imprecise assessment are reduced to the minimum possible degree.

Suggested Citation

  • Giuseppe Munda & Michela Nardo, 2009. "Noncompensatory/nonlinear composite indicators for ranking countries: a defensible setting," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(12), pages 1513-1523.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:applec:v:41:y:2009:i:12:p:1513-1523
    DOI: 10.1080/00036840601019364
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00036840601019364
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/00036840601019364?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. Kenneth J. Arrow & Herve Raynaud, 1986. "Social Choice and Multicriterion Decision-Making," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262511754, December.
    2. Truchon, M., 1998. "Figure Skating and the Theory of Social Choice," Papers 9814, Laval - Recherche en Politique Economique.
    3. Truchon, Michel, 1998. "An Extension of the Concordet Criterion and Kemeny Orders," Cahiers de recherche 9813, Université Laval - Département d'économique.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. William Gehrlein, 2002. "Condorcet's paradox and the likelihood of its occurrence: different perspectives on balanced preferences ," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 52(2), pages 171-199, March.
    2. Mohamed Drissi-Bakhkhat & Michel Truchon, 2004. "Maximum likelihood approach to vote aggregation with variable probabilities," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 23(2), pages 161-185, October.
    3. Azzini, Ivano & Munda, Giuseppe, 2020. "A new approach for identifying the Kemeny median ranking," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 281(2), pages 388-401.
    4. Giuseppe Munda, 2012. "Choosing Aggregation Rules for Composite Indicators," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 109(3), pages 337-354, December.
    5. Gamboa, Gonzalo & Munda, Giuseppe, 2007. "The problem of windfarm location: A social multi-criteria evaluation framework," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1564-1583, March.
    6. Truchon, Michel, 1999. "La démocratie : oui, mais laquelle?," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 75(1), pages 189-214, mars-juin.
    7. Truchon, Michel & Gordon, Stephen, 2009. "Statistical comparison of aggregation rules for votes," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 57(2), pages 199-212, March.
    8. Giuseppe Munda, 2012. "Intensity of preference and related uncertainty in non-compensatory aggregation rules," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 73(4), pages 649-669, October.
    9. Truchon, Michel, 1998. "Figure Skating and the Theory of Social Choice," Cahiers de recherche 9814, Université Laval - Département d'économique.
    10. Joey Au & Andrew Coleman & Trudy Sullivan, 2015. "A Practical Approach to Well-being Based Policy Development: What Do New Zealanders Want from Their Retirement Income Policies?," Treasury Working Paper Series 15/14, New Zealand Treasury.
    11. Dias, Luis C. & Lamboray, Claude, 2010. "Extensions of the prudence principle to exploit a valued outranking relation," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 201(3), pages 828-837, March.
    12. Tangian, Andranik S., 2004. "Constructing the composite indicator "Quality of work" from the third European survey on working conditions," WSI Working Papers 132, The Institute of Economic and Social Research (WSI), Hans Böckler Foundation.
    13. Zachary F. Lansdowne, 1996. "Ordinal ranking methods for multicriterion decision making," Naval Research Logistics (NRL), John Wiley & Sons, vol. 43(5), pages 613-627, August.
    14. Mala, Jozsef, 1999. "On [lambda]-majority voting paradoxes," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 39-44, January.
    15. Bernard Monjardet, 2006. "Condorcet domains and distributive lattices," Post-Print halshs-00119141, HAL.
    16. Chowdhury, Khorshed & Mallik, Girijasankar, 2007. "SPair-Wise Output Convergence in East Asia and the Pacific: An Application of Stochastic Unit Root Test," Economics Working Papers wp07-07, School of Economics, University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia.
    17. Wesley H. Holliday & Chase Norman & Eric Pacuit & Saam Zahedian, 2022. "Impossibility theorems involving weakenings of expansion consistency and resoluteness in voting," Papers 2208.06907, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2023.
    18. Fuad T. Aleskerov & Vladimir V. Pislyakov & Andrey N. Subochev, 2014. "Ranking Journals In Economics, Management And Political Science By Social Choice Theory Methods," HSE Working papers WP BRP 27/STI/2014, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
    19. Giuseppe Munda, 2015. "Beyond Gdp: An Overview Of Measurement Issues In Redefining ‘Wealth’," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(3), pages 403-422, July.
    20. Peter J. Hammond, 2022. "Prerationality as Avoiding Predictably Regrettable Consequences," Revue économique, Presses de Sciences-Po, vol. 73(6), pages 943-976.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:taf:applec:v:41:y:2009:i:12:p:1513-1523. 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAEC20 .

    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.