Ranking the World

de Alexander Cooley, Jack Snyder

"Over the last decade international rankings have emerged as a critical tool used by international actors engaged in global governance. State practices and performance are now judged by a number of high profile indexes, including assessments of their levels of corruption, quality of democracy, creditworthiness, media freedom, and business environment. However, these rankings always carry value judgments, methodological choices, and implicit political agendas. This volume expertly addresses the important analytical, normative and policy issues associated with the contemporary practice of 'grading states'. The chapters explore how rankings affect our perceptions about state performance, how states react to being ranked, why some rankings exert more global influence than others, and how states have come to strategize and respond to these public judgments. It also critically examines how treating state rankings like popular consumer choice indexes may actually lead policymakers to internalize questionable normative assumptions and lead to poorer, not improved, public policy outcomes"-- "On May 7, 2012, on his first day as once again elected President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin declared that he would make economic modernization the goal of his administration, vowing to take Russia from its current position as 120th on the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index (DBI) to 50th by 2015. The remark was noteworthy for two reasons: First, the Russian President chose the DBI as an authoritative and credible outside judge of the endemic bureaucratic corruption and dismal investment conditions that still characterize the country"--