The open method of co-ordination (OMC) intends to enhance EU Member States'performance on 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 recognized, several objections have...

Is there such a thing as an optimal government size? We investigate by the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) the so-called `Armey curve' which claims an inverted U-shaped relationship between government size and economic performance. The DEA scores are linked to control variables as...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how the ranking of countries based on the World Economic Forum's (WEF') competitiveness index is changed when the underlying primitive data dimensions of this composite index are aggregated using weights that are endogenously determined for...

Purpose – Most composite indicators of national performance limit their scope to only economic performance criteria and aggregate primitive performance data using subjective fixed weight values applied uniformly to all countries. This paper proposes a weighting method to correct for biases...