January 24, 2018
From the article:
So what’s the monkey business you speak of?
Last fortnight, World Bank chief economist Paul Romer dropped a bombshell with media comments that called the methodology behind the ranking into question, and imputed political motives to it. The controversy was centred around Chile, whose rankings fell from 34 in 2014 to 57 in 2018, but Romer suggested that the plunge was accentuated by changes in the methodology, the integrity of which he said he could not defend.
And political motives drove the changes?
Romer said he suspected political manipulation. Chile’s overall ranking has see-sawed between 25 and 57 since 2006, going down in periods when Socialist Party leader Michelle Bachelet was President, and rising when Conservative leader Sebastian Pinera was at the helm. Subsequently, however, Romer recanted his comments, and said he did not intend to attribute political motives or to suggest there was manipulation.
I get the picture. But this is only about Chile, right?
Romer said the World Bank would recalculate the rankings for four years to “see what the rankings would have been without the methodology changes”. If that happens, it could influence the rankings of other countries too, including India. Other World Bank officials have, however, defended the peer-reviewed changes to the methodology as fundamentally robust. In an official statement, the Bank said it would review only Chile’s ranking to clear the air.
Any idea what India’s rankings might then be?
We’ll have to wait a while to be sure, but independent analyses by the Centre for Global Development, which recalibrated the rankings using a fixed methdology, give India a lowly 147 in the rankings for 2018.