IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/hal-01178202.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Index of Economic Freedom: Methodological matters

Author

Listed:
  • Issaka Dialga

    (LEMNA - Laboratoire d'économie et de management de Nantes Atlantique - IEMN-IAE Nantes - Institut d'Économie et de Management de Nantes - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Nantes - UN - Université de Nantes)

  • Thomas Vallée

    (LEMNA - Laboratoire d'économie et de management de Nantes Atlantique - IEMN-IAE Nantes - Institut d'Économie et de Management de Nantes - Institut d'Administration des Entreprises - Nantes - UN - Université de Nantes)

Abstract

Composite indicators (CIs) are essential in public debates and policies so the social demand for synthetic tools is constantly increasing. They are also subject to criticism (see Saisana and Saltelli 2010; Klugman et al., 2011) due to lack of a gold standard in their construction. The Index of Economic Freedom (IEF) is one of these tools subject to criticism because it suffers from methodological matters. The IEF lacks statistical validity because two of its components are strongly and negatively correlated with the others. Both components are causing significant variations in 95 percent of countries ranked. This paper deals with these issues by using Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Benefit Of the Doubt (BOD) methods to generate component and country specific weights in computing the scores. The PCA and BOD analyses provide consistent results that differ dramatically with the baseline ones (results using equal weights). Given stable results provided by the PCA and BOD analysis, the IEF would receive broad legitimacy basing the calculation of its scores on endogenous weighting models.

Suggested Citation

  • Issaka Dialga & Thomas Vallée, 2015. "The Index of Economic Freedom: Methodological matters," Working Papers hal-01178202, HAL.
  • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-01178202
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-01178202
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://hal.science/hal-01178202/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jeni Klugman & Francisco Rodríguez & Hyung-Jin Choi, 2011. "The HDI 2010: new controversies, old critiques," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(2), pages 249-288, June.
    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. Marlous Milliano & Ilze Plavgo, 2018. "Analysing Multidimensional Child Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa: Findings Using an International Comparative Approach," Child Indicators Research, Springer;The International Society of Child Indicators (ISCI), vol. 11(3), pages 805-833, June.
    2. Chris Tofallis, 2013. "An automatic-democratic approach to weight setting for the new human development index," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 26(4), pages 1325-1345, October.
    3. David Roodman, 2011. "Composite indices," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(3), pages 483-484, September.
    4. Montfort Mlachila & René Tapsoba & Sampawende J. A. Tapsoba, 2017. "A Quality of Growth Index for Developing Countries: A Proposal," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 134(2), pages 675-710, November.
    5. Martin Ravallion, 2011. "The human development index: a response to Klugman, Rodriguez and Choi," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(3), pages 475-478, September.
    6. Mehmet Pinar, 2019. "Multidimensional Well-Being and Inequality Across the European Regions with Alternative Interactions Between the Well-Being Dimensions," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 144(1), pages 31-72, July.
    7. Nancy Birdsall, 2011. "Comment on multi-dimensional indices," The Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer;Society for the Study of Economic Inequality, vol. 9(3), pages 489-491, September.
    8. Selay Giray & Ozlem Ergut, 2014. "Multivariate Analysis of Countries according to Subdimensions of Human Development and Gender Inequality Indices," Eurasian Journal of Social Sciences, Eurasian Publications, vol. 2(3), pages 48-62.
    9. David E. Bloom & Victoria Y. Fan & Vadim Kufenko & Osondu Ogbuoji & Klaus Prettner & Gavin Yamey, 2021. "Going beyond GDP with a parsimonious indicator: inequality-adjusted healthy lifetime income," Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, Vienna Institute of Demography (VID) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, vol. 19(1), pages 127-140.
    10. Tommaso Luzzati & Bruno Cheli & Gianluca Gucciardi, 2017. "Communicating the uncertainty of synthetic indicators: a reassessment of the HDI ranking," Discussion Papers 2017/228, Dipartimento di Economia e Management (DEM), University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
    11. Simon Medcalfe, 2018. "Economic Well-Being in U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 139(3), pages 1147-1167, October.
    12. Mustafa, Ghulam & Rizov, Marian & Kernohan, David, 2017. "Growth, human development, and trade: The Asian experience," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 93-101.
    13. Leandro Prados de la Escosura, 2015. "World Human Development: 1870–2007," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 61(2), pages 220-247, June.
    14. Francesco Farina, 2015. "Development theory and poverty. A review," Working Papers 46-2015, Macerata University, Department of Studies on Economic Development (DiSSE), revised Jan 2015.
    15. Slough, Tara & Urpelainen, Johannes & Yang, Joonseok, 2015. "Light for all? Evaluating Brazil's rural electrification progress, 2000–2010," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 315-327.
    16. Ludovico Carrino, 2016. "Data Versus Survey-based Normalisation in a Multidimensional Analysis of Social Inclusion," Italian Economic Journal: A Continuation of Rivista Italiana degli Economisti and Giornale degli Economisti, Springer;Società Italiana degli Economisti (Italian Economic Association), vol. 2(3), pages 305-345, November.
    17. Massimiliano Agovino & Giuliana Parodi, 2015. "Human Development and the Determinants of the Incidence of Civilian Disability Pensions in Italy: A Spatial Panel Perspective," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 122(2), pages 553-576, June.
    18. Vincenzo Mauro & Mario Biggeri & Filomena Maggino, 2018. "Measuring and Monitoring Poverty and Well-Being: A New Approach for the Synthesis of Multidimensionality," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 135(1), pages 75-89, January.
    19. Sabina Alkire, 2016. "Measures of Human Development: Key Concepts and Properties," OPHI Working Papers ophiwp107.pdf, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford.
    20. F. Swen Kuh & Grace S. Chiu & Anton H. Westveld, 2019. "Modeling National Latent Socioeconomic Health and Examination of Policy Effects via Causal Inference," Papers 1911.00512, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Index of economic freedom; Principal components Analysis; Benefit of the Doubt weighting system; country ranking;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:hal:wpaper:hal-01178202. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.