Développement d'indices composites et politiques publiques : interactions, portée et limites méthodologiques

The Composite Indices (CI) are essential for policy-makers. They can be used to guide public policy. The same tools are used to evaluate the performance of public equities. However, they are subject to debate, as there are no standard rules for their construction. This paper discusses the methodological issues in the development of CI. It illustrates them by building a simple sustainable development index for 15 countries. Following the basic steps, the results obtained by the arithmetic mean show that in general, high-income countries, except the USA, have a higher 0.7 index. Emerging countries are the least sustainable of the sample, the developing countries are in an intermediate position. The geometric method provides mixed results. With this method, it is the emerging economies that become leaders in the standings and rich countries, except Australia, saw their index to deteriorate sharply. The sensitivity analysis indicates that the scores and rankings of countries are sensitive to the methods used. It confirms the uniqueness of the BOD method. The uncertainty weighting methodologies ranges from 1.27% to 95.16% in developing countries and emerging countries against 23% on average for the developed countries.