Mashup Indices of Development

By M. Ravallion. 2010

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Countries are increasingly being ranked by some new"mashup index of development,"defined as a composite index for which existing theory and practice provides little or no guidance to its design. Thus the index has an unusually large number of moving parts, which the producer is essentially free to set. The parsimony of these indices is often appealing -- collapsing multiple dimensions into just one, yielding unambiguous country rankings, and possibly reducing concerns about measurement errors in the component series. But the meaning, interpretation and robustness of these indices are often unclear. If they are to be properly understood and used, more attention needs to be given to their conceptual foundations, the tradeoffs they embody, the contextual factors relevant to country performance, and the sensitivity of the implied rankings to changing the data and weights. In short, clearer warning signs are needed for users. But even then, nagging doubts remain about the value-added of mashup indices, and their policy relevance, relative to the"dashboard"alternative of monitoring the components separately. Future progress in devising useful new composite indices of development will require that theory catches up with measurement practice.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac52e88c70c07a56a7eb16efc101387643c93624

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Citations in the corpus

Multidimensional poverty and inequality (2014, unknown): “…class of multidimensional indices proposed by Alkire and Foster (2011a, 2011b), see, among others, Birdsall (2011), Rippin (2010), Ferreira (2011), Ravallion (2011a, 2012a), Silber (2011), Thorbecke (2011), Ferreira and Lugo (2013), Duclos and Tiberti (forthcoming), and the reply by Alkire et…”
A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (2015, background): “regimes and in this way avoids the problem of subjective judgments by coders and the “mashup” quality of non-binary indices (Ravallion, 2011).”
The HDI 2010: new controversies, old critiques (2011, background): “Most notably, Ravallion (2010b) has argued that the tradeoffs implicit in the new HDI should be a cause of concern.”
Measuring energy poverty: Focusing on what matters (2012, unknown): “In that regard, Ravallion (2010) underlines the common gap between the theoretical ideal and practical measurement.”
Troubling Tradeoffs in the Human Development Index (2010, unknown): “For further discussion and references to the literature on money metrics of social welfare see Ravallion (2010a).”
Energy Governance, Transnational Rules, and the Resource Curse: Exploring the Effectiveness of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) (2016, methodology): “Instead of falling prey to what has been termed ‘‘data mashup” (Ravallion, 2012), we relied on the World Bank because its data are fully available to all, comprehensive, and peer-reviewed.”
Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance (2010, background): “Sen was one of the principal consultants on the Human Development Report of 1990, which first presented the HDI, and he at first objected to a crude composite index like the HDI, since there was so much other information in the report that was not included in the index (see also Ravallion 2010a, b).”
Inequality of Opportunity, Income Inequality and Economic Mobility: Some International Comparisons (2013, background): “After estimating the reduced-form regression of income on circumstances: (6) 10 However, see Ravallion (2011) on the potential pitfalls of such arbitrary aggregate indices or, as he calls them, “mashup indices” of development.”