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This paper aims to develop and implement a new approach of ranking countries according to their level of economic competitiveness.

Competitiveness is conceptualized as the degree of participation in global integration, measured by the levels of exports, capital inflows and immigration. Based on a wide range of development indicators, composite indicators are constructed by means of a principal component analysis. In turn, these composites enter a canonical correlation analysis and estimated canonical weights are used as weights in the calculation of index scores.

Measures of institutional and political quality are shown to be most closely connected to a country’s ability to export and to attract foreign factors of production. Inflows of foreign capital turn out to correlate much less with our weighting composites than export volumes.

Regarding prospects for future research, a broad range of further applications of this approach in the macro area is conceivable, including measures of a country’s quality of schooling, the quality of its health care system or of its governmental institutions.

In comparison to prevailing macroeconomic indices, this method of index construction is superior in at least two respects. First, direct measures of a country’s performance are methodologically separated from mere performance drivers, contributing to higher clarity concerning the concept to be measured. Second, weights of performance drivers are not determined arbitrarily or based on subjective judgment, but emerge from a transparent and well-established statistical procedure.

Current literature presents limited measurement methods of quantifying manufacturers' performance with environmental concerns. The purpose of this paper is to construct a company performance index for benchmarking motor vehicle manufacturers (MVMs) with environmental concerns.

Methods of constructing the index include regression analysis, a modified linear method for normalizing variables and a geometric mean for aggregating variables into a single index I_MVM (index for MVMs). A case study is conducted in 12 MVMs from 2008 to 2017. A sensitivity analysis with the simple additive weighting method is performed to analyze how different aggregation methods affect the final value. The index I_MVM is assessed through a benchmark with three existing indices.

Three realistic considerations are identified from MVMs, based on which proper and transparent methods are chosen to construct the I_MVM. The construction of the index I_MVM has been assessed through a benchmark against the methodologies of three other indices. The results indicate that the new measurement is feasible and effective for MVMs to measure their company performance from an environmental perspective.

The construction of the index I_MVM can support policymakers with accurate statistics for decision-making. As a response to current imperative climate policies, this paper raises awareness of CO₂ emissions in vehicles' production. For statistical organizations and stakeholders in the investment world, this paper provides available and reliable statistics for trend analysis of different MVMs.

A new method is designed for constructing a company performance index for MVMs. Three environmental variables are identified based on literature, their environmental impact as well as their data availability from public documents. A ranking by manufacturer with environmental concerns is generated. This index can contribute with available statistics and useful insights toward decision-making.

We examine sample characteristics and elicited survey measures of two studies, the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), where interviews are done either in person or by phone, and the Understanding America Study (UAS), where surveys are completed online and a replica of the HRS core questionnaire is administered. By considering variables in various domains, our investigation provides a comprehensive assessment of how Internet data collection compares to more traditional interview modes. We document clear demographic differences between the UAS and HRS samples in terms of age and education. Yet, sample weights correct for these discrepancies and allow one to satisfactorily match population benchmarks as far as key socio- demographic variables are concerned. Comparison of a variety of survey outcomes with population targets shows a strikingly good fit for both the HRS and the UAS. Outcome distributions in the HRS are only marginally closer to population targets than outcome distributions in the UAS. These patterns arise regardless of which variables are used to construct post-stratification weights in the UAS, confirming the robustness of these results. We find little evidence of mode effects when comparing the subjective measures of self-reported health and life satisfaction across interview modes. Specifically, we do not observe very clear primacy or recency effects for either health or life satisfaction. We do observe a significant social desirability effect, driven by the presence of an interviewer, as far as life satisfaction is concerned. By and large, our results suggest that Internet surveys can match high-quality traditional surveys.

As an economic development strategy, entrepreneurship policies should target innovative activities – those which Schumpeter described as leading to new goods, production methods, markets, input sources, or new industries. However, popular entrepreneurship proxies, such as firm births (<500 employees) and sole proprietorships, capture multiple types of entrepreneurship which may have conflicting qualities. To address the need for more accurate measures of Schumpeterian activity, indices are constructed to specifically measure the relative amount of Schumpeterian activity among US states. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Four composite indices of Schumpeterian activity are constructed using different methods to combine variables related to innovative activity into single indicator, since there is uncertainty about the weighting of dimensions: principal component analysis (PCA), factor analysis (FA), data envelopment analysis and equal weights. Robustness checks were used to compare state rankings across indices. These indices were also compared to common entrepreneurship proxies and real GDP to demonstrate and justify their measurement of Schumpeterian activity.

The results show that the Schumpeterian Activity Indices (SAIs) similarly rank states and measure phenomena different from the common proxies of entrepreneurship. Furthermore, these indices better predict GDP than the common proxies. Lastly, state rankings based upon the SAIs support previous research suggesting that innovation and agglomeration economies are interrelated.

The paper demonstrates a methodology for constructing a measure of innovative activity, which is necessary to develop and evaluate entrepreneurship policy for economic development.

A quantitative contractor selection technique which embraces the pre‐qualification, evaluation and final selection processes is being developed. The emphasis is on evaluating contractors' performance potential in terms of their ability to achieve time, cost and quality standards. This approach is in contrast to the majority of current selection techniques which tend to prequalify, then discriminate predominantly on the cost component of tenders. The conceptual model is applied to a hypothetical but realistic scenario of a contractor competing for a small industrial contract. This illustrates the mechanics of the new technique, emphasizing that contractor selection should include identifying the contractor with the best performance potential and not merely the lowest bidder.

This study aims to investigate the implications of quality management system (QMS) practices in employees' attitudes relating to job involvement, job satisfaction, career satisfaction, and organizational commitment.

This study was accomplished through the use of a questionnaire. Twenty hypotheses related to QMS practices and the employees' attitudes were formulated and tested.

The results indicate that responsibility and teamwork have a significant and positive correlation with job involvement, job satisfaction, career satisfaction, as well as organizational commitment. Ongoing improvement and problem solving have significant implications in organizational commitment. In addition, training and education, as well as customer focus, did not demonstrate any favorable contribution to the employees' attitudes.

The study recommends that management should be more committed to the development of quality practices to sustain and enhance employees' positive attitudes toward their job. Such practices are a competitive strategy to attract and retain competent employees.

To maintain the bottom line of food import risk in China, this paper proposes a novel risk state evaluation model based on bottom-line thinking after analyzing the decision-making ideas embedded in the bottom-line thinking method.

First, the order relation analysis method (G1 method) and Laplacian score (LS) are applied to calculate the constant weights of indexes. Then, the worst-case scenario of food import risk can be estimated to strive for the best result, so the penalty state variable weight function is introduced to obtain variable weights of indexes. Finally, the study measures the risk state of China's food import from the overall situation using the set pair analysis (SPA) method and identifies the key factors affecting food import risk.

The risk states of food supply in eight countries are in the state of average potential and partial back potential as a whole. The results indicate that China's food import risks are at medium and upper-medium risk levels in most years, fluctuating slightly from 2010 to 2020. In addition, some factors are diagnosed as the primary control objects for holding the bottom line of food import risk in China, including food output level, food export capacity, bilateral relationship and political risk.

This paper proposes a novel risk state evaluation model following bottom-line thinking for food import risk in China. Besides, SPA is first applied to the risk evaluation of food import, expanding the application field of the SPA method.

Subjects the league table of universities published in The Times and The Times Good University Guide in 1995 and 1996 to statistical and conceptual analyses. Shows the “measures” used by the compilers of the tables to be problematic in a number of technical respects. Shows that the number of underlying variables is largely reducible to a single factor which discriminates between pre‐1992 and post‐1992 universities. Casts serious doubt on the validity of the tables from both technical and conceptual perspectives.

Four term‐weighting schemes are used to detect information‐rich passages in texts and the results are compared. It is demonstrated that word categories and frequency‐derived weights have a close correlation but that weighting according to the first mention theory or the cue‐method shows no correlation with frequency‐based weights.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with methodological issues in the Index of Economic Freedom (IEF) building by using principal components analysis (PCA) and benefit of the doubt (BOD) methods to generate component- and country-specific weights in computing the scores.

The paper uses endogenous model and country-specific weight system to generate country-specific score unlike the equal weight used by the Heritage Foundation.

The PCA and BOD analyses provide consistent results that differ dramatically with the baseline ones (results using equal weights).

The limitation of the paper is that the results change depending on the method used.

Given results provided by the PCA and BOD analysis, the IEF would receive broad legitimacy basing the calculation of its scores on endogenous weighting models.

As composite indicators are essential in public debates and policies, their construction must be objective and well-known by a large public, making the methodological matters in composite indexes building one of the big challenge to researchers and a major democratic issue.

The originality of the paper is to use endogenous approach to generate weights and countries’ scores.