Can Disaggregated Indicators Identify Governance Reform Priorities?

Kraay, Aart ; Tawara, Norikazu

关键词: ACCESS TO INFORMATION;    ACCOUNTABILITY;    ADDITIONAL REGRESSORS;    ADMINISTRATIVE REGULATIONS;    AGGREGATE INDICATOR;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-5254
RP-ID  :  WPS5254

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Many highly-disaggregated cross-countryindicators of institutional quality and the businessenvironment have been developed in recent years. The promiseof these indicators is that they can be used to identifyspecific reform priorities that policymakers and aid donorscan target in their efforts to improve institutional andregulatory quality outcomes. Doing so however requiresevidence on the partial effects of these many very detailedvariables on outcomes of interest, for example, investorperceptions of corruption or the quality of the regulatoryenvironment. In this paper we use Bayesian Model Averaging(BMA) to systematically document the partial correlationsbetween disaggregated indicators and several closely-relatedoutcome variables of interest using two leading datasets:the Global Integrity Index and the Doing Businessindicators. We find major instability across outcomes andacross levels of disaggregation in the set of indicatorsidentified by BMA as important determinants of outcomes.Disaggregated indicators that are important determinants ofone outcome are on average not important determinants ofother very similar outcomes. And for a given outcomevariable, indicators that are important at one level ofdisaggregation are on average not important at other levelsof disaggregation. These findings illustrate thedifficulties in using highly-disaggregated indicators toidentify reform priorities.