A new Ease of Doing Business Index for G20 countries: a consensus-based approach to weighting individual indicators
Description
Although many studies have been devoted to the problem of weighting composite indicators, which includes care for obtaining weights from expert opinion, little attention is paid to the way experts assess the weights of individual indicators or the effect that Conversion of the evaluation format exerts on the levels of consensus. That is, it is not known to what extent these functions impair the degree of consensus between individual judgments and collective results. Understanding the extent of this effect helps to identify which conversion functions generate the weights most compatible with the opinion of the group of experts. This identification is relevant because it makes it possible to weigh the composite indicators with the set of weights most compatible with the collective opinion, avoiding less representative considerations in relation to the evaluations of the group of experts. This dataset contains data that make it possible to identify which function of converting the evaluation format reaches the highest degree of consensus between the experts' judgments and the collective evaluation. This analysis is carried out using as an example one of the most popular composite indicators in the literature: the world bank's Ease of Doing Business Index. The Expert assessment and Weights worksheet contains the evaluations of six experts on the relative importance of individual indicators. The evaluations are presented in the ordering of alternatives (OA) format, that is, the individual indicators are placed in order of importance. The spreadsheet also includes: 1.) the conversion of the alternatives in OA format to Multiplicative Relation (MR) format, as well as the calculations of the weights for the AHP; and 2.) converting the alternatives in OA format to weights in a value-for-value format, applying four different functions. The Indicators spreadsheet brings the ranking of the ease of doing business index of the G20 countries calculated by weighting the individual indicators with the weights obtained by the different functions presented in the Expert assessment and Weights spreadsheet. The Indicators spreadsheet also includes the robustness and sensitivity analysis of the composite indicator.
Files
Steps to reproduce
The methods and protocols necessary to reproduce are presented in the document Materials and methods. The experiment can be reproduce using MatLab or Octave from the files in the folder MatLab.zip.