We analyze the relationship between institutional infrastructure (capturing political stability, quality of government and social infrastructure) and overall country productivity for a sample of 57 (OECD and non-OECD) countries. Specifically, we compare empirical results for alternative...

The neo-institutional approach to economic phenomena has forwarded the institutional framework within a society as a fundamental determinant of economic performance. Cultural characteristics, also referred to as "societal capital", have gained specific attention in this respect. Basically, a...

Composite indicators are regularly used for benchmarking countries’ performance, but equally often stir controversies about the unavoidable subjectivity that is connected with their construction. Data Envelopment Analysis helps to overcome some key limitations, viz., the undesirable dependence...

The Open Method of Coordination (OMC) intends to enhance EU member states' performance with regard to social inclusion. In this context a set of commonly agreed performance indicators plays an important role. While the communicative power of a synthetic indicator has been recognised, several...

We consider the lack of consensus about an appropriate theoretical framework linking sub-indicators as a defining characteristic of composite indicators. This intrinsic feature implies uncertainties about the appropriate normalisation and aggregation of the raw data. The two are related: index...

It is common practice to summarise the economic performance of countries in terms of four dimensions (real growth, inflation, unemployment and the external account), which are visually captured by the magic diamond of the OECD. In this paper we present a synthetic performance measure which...