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Cite as: André Broome, Alexandra Homolar, and Matthias Kranke (2018) ‘Bad Science: International Organizations and the
Indirect Power of Global Benchmarking’. European Journal of International Relations 24, forthcoming.
Bad science: International organizations and the indirect
power of global benchmarking
André Broome
University of Warwick, UK
Alexandra Homolar
University of Warwick, UK
Matthias Kranke
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major
source of influence for international organizations (IOs). To reinforce their expert status, IOs
increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of
issue areas. This article illustrates how IO benchmarking is a significant source of indirect
power in world politics by examining two prominent cases in which IOs seek to shape the
world through comparative metrics: (1) the World Bank–International Finance Corporation
Ease of Doing Business ranking; and (2) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index. We argue that the legitimacy attached to
these benchmarks because of the expertise of the IOs that produce them is highly problematic
for two reasons. First, both benchmarks oversimplify the evaluation of relative national
performance, misrepresenting contested political values drawn from a specific transnational
paradigm as empirical facts. Second, they entrench an arbitrary division in the international
arena between ‘ideal’ and ‘pathological’ types of national performance, which (re)produces
social hierarchies among states. We argue that the ways in which IOs use benchmarking to
orient how political actors understand best practices, advocate policy changes, and attribute
political responsibility thus constitutes ‘bad science’. Extending research on processes of
paradigm maintenance and the influence of IOs as teachers of norms or judges of norm
compliance, we show how the indirect power that IOs exercise as evaluators of relative national
performance through benchmarking can be highly consequential for the definition of states’
policy priorities.
Keywords
Business regulation, foreign direct investment, global benchmarking, global governance,
international organizations, indirect power
1
Introduction
Since the turn of the century, there has been an unprecedented expansion in the use of
benchmarking as a governing strategy across all areas of social and economic life in a growing
number of countries. At the same time as benchmarking has become a core tool of domestic
regulation, transnational actors have increasingly produced ratings and rankings to assess
relative national performance at the global level. Benchmarks have become integral to the
comparative evaluation of countries’ institutional design, policy agendas, and behaviour across
issue areas as diverse as global development goals (Clegg, 2015), climate change action
(Kuzemko, 2015), corruption (Baumann, 2017), human security (Homolar, 2015), international
human rights norms (Harrison and Sekalala, 2015), national economic policies and institutions
(Sending and Lie, 2015), political freedom (Bush, 2017), and poverty reduction (Freistein,
2016). Global benchmarks based on country rankings are deceptively easy to communicate and
consume around the world.
Consistent with the rise of benchmarking, International Relations scholars have recently
begun to direct attention to the politics of utilizing comparative national performance metrics
(Hansen and Mühlen-Schulte, 2012; Mügge, 2016). Within this emerging research agenda,
work has focused on how – and to what extent – benchmarks directly influence the behaviour
of target states (Cooley and Snyder, 2015), as well as how benchmarking practices draw on
and reinforce existing transnational policy paradigms and dominant discourse (Broome and
Quirk, 2015a; Fougner, 2008). This article contributes to such research by providing a
conceptual critique of the production and dissemination of comparative national performance
metrics by prominent international organizations (IOs). We connect the global governance role
that IOs play in measuring and evaluating relative national performance to two strands of earlier
research on how IOs seek to shape standards of ‘best practice’: (1) work on IOs as teachers of
norms (Finnemore, 1993, Jacoby 2001); and (2) work on IOs as judges of norm compliance
(Hafner-Burton, 2008; Sharman, 2009). IOs were pioneers in developing benchmarks in the
early 1990s, and of the more than 200 new global benchmarks that were created from 2000 to
2015, at least 40 were established by IOs (Global Benchmarking Database, 2017). Our
emphasis on IOs as evaluators is in contrast to existing works in International Relations, which
analyse benchmarking practices either as a general trend among different categories of
transnational actors (Cooley and Snyder, 2015; see also Broome and Quirk, 2015b; Merry et
al., 2015), or focus on a single benchmark that has been retrospectively identified as influencing
state behavior (Kelley and Simmons, 2015).
In this article, we explore how comparative performance metrics produced by IOs continue
to be plagued by two problems that create and reproduce distorted images of the world. First,
input factors differ far more than the methodologies used in the design of global benchmarks
imply. Countries have vastly divergent structural positions (in both political and economic
terms), and are endowed with sharply uneven capacities to implement domestic policies or to
exercise international agency over global rules and policy norms. These differences tend to be
glossed over in the process of operationalizing key concepts of national performance. Second,
outputs often differ far less than the league tables portrayed in IO benchmarks indicate.
Especially when they are produced in the form of rankings, benchmarks commonly exaggerate
2
differences in performance between countries, obscuring a high degree of similarity in
institutional forms and performance outcomes within country clusters (Høyland et al., 2012).
Because these related input and output problems tend to be swept under the carpet by the
political agents that produce and utilize them, IO benchmarks receive more scientific credibility
than they deserve. We argue in this article that IO benchmarking is often troubled by
questionable methodology and data collection biases because the use of transnational
knowledge by IOs to produce global benchmarks cannot be separated from political values and
policy reform preferences. Consequently, rather than underwriting the role they claim as ‘truthtellers’ to their member states, through benchmarking IOs help to maintain existing
transnational policy paradigms and to legitimate existing hierarchies in world politics. Power
relations are thus an inherent feature of the ‘bad science’ of IO benchmarking exercises. As the
article demonstrates, benchmarks are a key source of indirect power for IOs to shape world
politics according to their image of best practice in a given issue area, connecting their
organizational expertise to the promotion of ‘ideal’ and ‘pathological’ models of state policy
and performance.
The article proceeds as follows. First, we build on the existing literature that emphasizes the
workings of indirect power in order to establish the importance of understanding the role
international organisations play as evaluators in world politics. We then expand on the
conceptualization of the effects of IO benchmarking through a discussion of two empirical
cases of IO benchmarking: (1) the World Bank–International Finance Corporation (IFC) Ease
of Doing Business (EDB) ranking;1 and (2) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index (FDI Index). In each example,
we show how the benchmark does not deserve its reputation as an aggregation of neutral
observations of national progress in a given issue area. Instead, they suffer from construct and
content validity problems because they lack a scientific basis for how they operationalize
highly political concepts into what are perceived as objective, value-neutral categories. In the
final section, we discuss how IO benchmarking functions as a mechanism of paradigm
maintenance by promoting oversimplified images of the world as split between ideal and
pathological forms of state policy and performance. Despite containing significant
methodological problems and representing contested policy ideas as best practices, IO
benchmarks achieve legitimacy – and thereby policy traction – by piggybacking on the status
of the organizations that produce them as expert evaluators.
International organizations as evaluators of national performance
IOs wield power over other political actors either directly or indirectly. Until recently, most
International Relations scholarship on how IOs shape world politics has focused on identifying
and explaining how they are able to exercise direct power over states, primarily through carrotand-stick approaches and the resolution of information problems. Within this literature, IOs are
seen as influential if they are institutionally mandated and endowed with sufficient resources
to organize bailouts for distressed economies, to coordinate crisis management policies or
1
The EDB ranking is a Flagship Report of the World Bank Group, which comprises five IOs. The IFC produces
the EDB Report in collaboration with the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the
International Development Association (hereafter ‘the World Bank’).
3
development financing, and to impose loan conditionality (Lütz and Kranke, 2014; Moschella,
2016; Nelson, 2014, Park and Strand, 2016). Research has also shown that IOs can exercise
direct power over states by monitoring and enforcing compliance with international agreements
(Simmons, 2000), as well as by directing and sponsoring capacity building programmes that
encompass international policy training and technical assistance initiatives (Broome and
Seabrooke, 2015). Related work locates additional sources of direct IO influence in their
mandated surveillance on behalf of member states (Lombardi and Woods, 2008) and policy
reform advice to national elites (Fang and Stone, 2012).
Channels of institutional influence in global governance stretch far beyond the visible sets
of formal relations between transnational actors and national policymakers. International
Relations scholarship has begun to pay greater attention to the ability of political agents to
exercise ‘indirect control over the conditions of action of socially distant others’ (Barnett and
Duvall, 2005: 48), even though these dynamics are often harder to observe and specify than
more direct forms of coercion (see Figure 1). In our investigation of how IOs shape policy
agendas and preferences through benchmarking, we directly speak to such scholarship, adding
to two key research strands on the indirect power of IOs in world politics.
The first body of scholarship focuses on transnational socialization processes and provides
insights into how IOs can serve as teachers of norms to states. This approach establishes IOs
as institutional actors who are not only able to socialize policy elites into a common framework
of understanding in a given issue area (Finnemore, 1993; Jacoby, 2001), but who can also foster
‘diagnostic coordination’ in how policy problems are defined and acted upon as policymakers
move along a common ‘policy curve’ (Broome and Seabrooke, 2015). The second body of
scholarship centres on the role of stigma, showing that some IOs function as judges that impose
reputational costs on countries that fail to comply with international norms through
stigmatization. Such forms of ‘shaming’ can occur through the blacklisting of states deemed to
have violated particular normative standards, which both imposes a reputational sanction and
triggers incentives for compliance (Hafner-Burton, 2008; Sharman, 2009). The explicit use or
implicit threat of shaming provides IOs with a valuable tool for enforcing international norms,
especially if stigmatization produces knock-on effects for aid flows, foreign investment, or
sovereign credit ratings (Chwieroth, 2015). We build on and extend these literatures on the
indirect power of IOs by focusing on how IOs serve as evaluators of national performance via
global benchmarking. As with socialization and stigmatization processes, the evaluative role
that IOs play as benchmarkers can also serve as a mechanism of ‘paradigm maintenance’
(Wade, 1996) by delineating what does and does not count as legitimate transnational
knowledge.
The notion that IOs exercise agential power through knowledge practices is consistent with
existing constructivist literature in International Relations. Such scholarship has shown that
their expert status and ‘cognitive authority’ helps IOs to turn policy developments into
governable issues to diffuse political ideas and set policy agendas (Broome and Seabrooke,
2012; Clegg, 2010; Hülsse, 2007); to validate and promote emergent norms (Park and
Vetterlein, 2010; Weaver, 2008); and to develop, maintain, and adapt transnational policy
paradigms (Babb, 2013; Ban, 2016; Broad, 2006; Wade, 1996).
Indirect power frequently works through disciplinary dynamics that are far subtler than the
‘sticks’ of threats, sanctions, or delegation. It is conceptualized here as relations that are rooted
4
Financial assistance/sanctions
Monitoring compliance
Crisis management
Capacity building
Policy advice and surveillance
Direct power model
International
organizations
Indirect power model
Policy paradigms
Issue framing
Diffusion of ideas
Responsibility attribution
International comparisons
Figure 1. Direct and indirect expressions of IO power.
in the formation and control of what bodies of knowledge become accepted, or what counts, in
Pierre Bourdieu’s (1989: 20) words, as ‘the legitimate vision of the world’. Based on this
specific understanding of indirect power, we argue that IO benchmarks create meaning through
knowledge-based articulations of the problems facing national officials and through the
designation of countries’ standing relative to their peers, which establishes social hierarchies
of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ performers. Such hierarchies connect the promotion of international norms
with social pressure on states to conform to these standards of behaviour and policy design
(Towns and Rumelili, 2017). We refer to the best practice model a global comparative
performance metric produces as an ‘image’: ‘Like a photographic image, it foregrounds a
particular aspect of the world and excludes others’ (Fry and O’Hagan, 2000: 5; see also Hansen,
2011).
The country evaluations produced by IOs can be expected to carry greater weight than those
produced by more openly partisan actors or cause-oriented organizations. The expert status that
prominent IOs have achieved through their mandate and track record – backed by institutional
resources in terms of expert human capital and combined with an organizational culture that
privileges accepted positivist methodologies in knowledge production – enhances their
influence in transnational policy debates. As a rich scholarly literature has already
demonstrated, the most prominent IOs often seek to cultivate their standing among their
respective audiences as ‘truth-tellers’ that can cut through the log-jam of national interests,
partisan differences, and domestic veto-players by appealing to the rational-scientific basis of
their policy knowledge and advice (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Béland and Orenstein, 2013;
Broad, 2006; Broome and Seabrooke, 2012; Ecker-Ehrhardt, 2012; Kramarz and Momani,
2013). Recent case study research suggests that IOs are perceived by citizens as having greater
credibility than national governments in reporting on relative national performance, even when
they are providing the same information (James and Petersen, 2017).
The expert authority with which IOs construct ratings and rankings of national performance
therefore differs from other producers of global benchmarks, such as civil society
organizations, market actors, and states. Unlike activist organizations, IOs enjoy greater
resources to exercise political leverage and benefit from an official mandate for action in a
specified policy domain. Unlike market actors, IOs do not use benchmarks for commercial
gain, but to shape policy conversations and political agendas. Unlike states, finally, IOs do not
pursue national interests by using benchmarks as a tool of foreign policy, which can more easily
link indirect power to direct coercion. In contrast to these other types of benchmark producers,
IOs rely more heavily on recognition of their role as expert producers of transnational
knowledge to gain public attention and policy traction.
IO benchmarking in practice
IO benchmarks often enjoy a reputation as science-based metrics of comparative national
performance that are removed from the political contests characteristic of many transnational
processes. Despite the high degree of credibility assigned to them, as we will show, IO
benchmarks suffer from construct and content validity problems that create distorted
representations of the quality of country performance. Construct validity refers to whether the
evaluation techniques used to construct a global benchmark effectively measure what they
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purport to measure, in particular how effectively key concepts are defined, operationalized, and
weighted as a set of variables; whether consistent and high-quality cross-national data are
available; and whether the various types of source material used are equally robust and are
internally coherent, which is especially challenging in the case of composite benchmarks. In
short, construct validity concerns the degree of ontological fit between measurement
techniques and empirical objectives. Content validity refers to whether the scope of a
benchmark provides adequate coverage of the multiple dimensions of an issue area to
effectively capture and measure performance, or whether critical dimensions are excluded
(Michener, 2015: 187, 189).
In this section, we provide empirical illustrations of how IOs rely upon their expert status to
disseminate seemingly neutral observations of national progress in a given issue area.
Specifically, we discuss two benchmarks that are each produced by a well-resourced IO that
enjoys high prestige as a creator and disseminator of transnational policy knowledge: the Ease
of Doing Business ranking and the FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index. We selected these
two benchmarks from the Global Benchmarking Database (2017), an online repository of 275
global benchmarks that we created and continue to expand.2 Our rationale was to select
benchmarks that differ in their core attributes, instead of choosing benchmarks from the same
issue area or those produced by different categories of actors, as is common in recent
comparative studies (see Michener, 2015). The cases differ along the following lines: what
issue area they cover; whether they evaluate statutory regulations or performance outcomes;
whether they translate the results into ratings (scores) or country rankings; what type of source
material they use; how many countries they cover; and how much media attention they receive
(see Table 1). The focus on IO benchmarks with different core attributes not only draws
attention to the methodological limitations of benchmarks in a specific issue area, but also
highlights the common factors at play in how different IOs use benchmarks as instruments of
indirect power.
The World Bank–IFC Ease of Doing Business ranking
Few IO benchmarks have gained as much attention and generated as much controversy as the
Ease of Doing Business (EDB) ranking of the local business environment for small and
medium-sized private sector firms in World Bank member states. The benchmark has been
published annually since 2006 as a core component of the flagship World Bank–IFC Doing
Business report. The explicit foundation of the Doing Business report is the assumption that
economic activity benefits from ‘Rules that set out and clarify property rights and facilitate the
resolution of disputes …[a]nd that enhance the predictability of economic interactions’ (World
Bank, 2016: 13). The report traces reform trajectories around the world, showcasing the ‘big
strides in business regulation’ achieved ‘in every region’ and praising the ‘most improved’
countries (World Bank, 2015: 16, 35–53). Countries with a higher (= better) year-on-year
aggregate score are highlighted with an upward arrow in the ranking, while the rankings are
accompanied by short country reform summaries, which can additionally signal what each
country has done well or badly since the previous ranking with a tick or a cross, respectively.
2
N = 275 in version 1.9 as of 30 May 2017. Available at: http://warwick.ac.uk/globalbenchmarking/database.
6
Ease of Doing Business ranking
FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index
Producer
World Bank—International Finance
Corporation
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development
Issue area
Business environment
Investment regulation
Evaluation target
Statutory regulations
Statutory regulations
Results format
Country rankings
Country ratings (scores)
Source material
Large-N expert survey
Review of statutory regulations
Coverage
190 countries
59 countries
Media attention
High
Low
Table 1. Selected benchmark characteristics.
However, positions at the top and bottom of the rankings tend to remain stable over time, as
Table 2 illustrates.
The EDB ranking encompasses ten categories of economic governance that are used to
measure the quality of the regulatory environment in each economy, focusing on the regulation
of small and medium-size enterprises. The data is based on survey questionnaire responses
from over 12,500 legal experts and business consultants in the 190 countries included in the
report. The ten categories of business regulation assessed to produce the ranking are: (1)
‘starting a business’; (2) ‘dealing with construction permits’; (3) ‘getting electricity’; (4)
‘registering property’; (5) ‘getting credit’; (6) ‘protecting minority investors’; (7) ‘paying
taxes’; (8) ‘trading across borders’; (9) ‘enforcing contracts’; and (10) ‘resolving insolvency’.
The Doing Business report also includes indicators on labour market regulation, but these have
been excluded from the EDB ranking since 2011 following criticism from the International
Labour Organization, the International Trade Union Confederation, and other bodies of the
validity of the ‘employing workers’ indicator and the causal assumptions that underpinned it
(Lee et al., 2008). Reflecting the free market principle that labour markets work best with
minimal protections for workers, in EDB rankings prior to Doing Business 2008 the
‘employing workers’ indicator ranked countries more positively based on how easy it was to
dismiss workers, while restrictions on night work such as overtime pay and scheduling of work
hours limitations were classified as ‘rigidities’, which received more negative scores (World
Bank, 2017a). Index scores for each of the ten individual components of the benchmark are
produced through expert assessments of the legal context and procedures in each country, after
these aspects have been analyzed by World Bank–IFC officials and checked against statutory
rules and regulations.
The EDB ranking is widely cited as ‘an authoritative and credible outside judge’ of a
country’s business environment (Cooley, 2015: 1) and receives substantial press coverage and
global media attention (Davis et al., 2012: 93). According to citation data provided by the
World Bank (2016b: 24, fn. 11), from the first Doing Business volume in 2003 to 2016, the
report’s indicators have been dealt with in 2,182 peer-reviewed articles in academic journals
and 6,206 online working papers. In addition to the high level of interest from journalists and
academics alike, political leaders have made improving their countries’ EDB ranking an
official objective of government policy (Besley, 2015: 99–100).
Consider the case of Russia’s commitment to structural economic reform, which formed
part of a larger effort by the country’s government to attract higher rates of foreign investment.
President Vladimir Putin explicitly referenced the EDB rankings to signal Russia’s move
toward internationally recognized standards of ‘doing business’. In special decrees published
in May 2012, Putin announced an interim goal for Russia to reach 50th place in the EDB ranking
by 2015, and a longer-term target of achieving 20th position by 2018 (Pomeranz and Smith,
2016). Putin’s interim goal was only missed by the narrowest of margins: the country’s position
improved rapidly from its EDB ranking of 120th in 2012 to 112th in 2013, 92nd in 2014, 62nd in
2015, 51st in 2016, and 40th in 2017. This substantial rise in Russia’s EDB ranking was made
possible by selective liberalizing reforms, through which the Russian government targeted the
specific areas covered by the indicators used to produce the EDB ranking, including policy
changes relating to ‘starting a business’, ‘getting electricity’, ‘registering property’, ‘getting
credit’, and ‘paying taxes’ (World Bank, 2015: 179).
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2015
2016
2017
Top 10
countries
Singapore (1)
New Zealand (2)
Hong Kong SAR, China (3)
Denmark (4)
Korea, Rep. (5)
Norway (6)
United States (7)
United Kingdom (8)
Finland (9)
Australia (10)
Singapore (1)
New Zealand (2)
Denmark (3)
Korea, Rep. (4)
Hong Kong SAR, China (5)
United Kingdom (6)
United States (7)
Sweden (8)
Norway (9)
Finland (10)
New Zealand (1)
Singapore (2)
Denmark (3)
Hong Kong SAR, China (4)
Korea, Rep. (5)
Norway (6)
United Kingdom (7)
United States (8)
Sweden (9)
Macedonia, FYR (10)
Bottom 10
countries
Haiti (180)
Angola (181)
Venezuela, RB (182)
Afghanistan (183)
Congo, Dm. Rep. (184)
Chad (185)
South Sudan (186)
Central African Rep. (187)
Libya (188)
Eritrea (189)
Equatorial Guinea (180)
Angola (181)
Haiti (182)
Chad (183)
Congo, Dem. Rep. (184)
Central African Rep. (185)
Venezuela, RB (186)
South Sudan (187)
Libya (188)
Eritrea (189)
Haiti (181)
Angola (182)
Afghanistan (183)
Congo, Dem. Rep. (184)
Central African Rep. (185)
South Sudan (186)
Venezuela, RB (187)
Libya (188)
Eritrea (189)
Somalia (190)
Table 2. Top 10 and bottom 10 listings in the Ease of Doing Business ranking, 2015–2017.
Source: Data retrieved from Doing Business reports, available at: http://www.doingbusiness.org/Reports.
The value attached to the benchmark when it comes to the investment promotion strategy
adopted by Russia’s president, as well as leaders from countries as diverse as India and the
Republic of Georgia (Schueth, 2015), suggests that it has become a symbolic marker of national
status and relative economic competitiveness. As then-World Bank Chief Economist Kaushik
Basu claimed, the EDB has achieved the status of ‘one of the world’s most influential policy
publications’ (World Bank, 2015: iv) and thus carries a significant degree of political
legitimacy. In turn, the knowledge-based authority associated with the benchmark implies that
there is a risk that IOs and other agencies start ‘teaching to the test’ to obtain policy adjustments
only in the specific areas covered by the EDB indicators. The EDB ranking thus constrains the
space for tailoring reform proposals to individual countries’ needs: it places a penalty on
fostering the development of innovative policy alternatives that lie outside the ‘EDB box’ and
that do not reflect the neoliberal policy paradigm at the heart of the conceptual categories used
to construct the ranking.
For the World Bank and the IFC, the EDB ranking provides a powerful symbolic instrument
that establishes a hierarchy of regulatory shortcomings across countries, as well as shaping
policy conversations and guiding officials towards what are presented as optimal policy
reforms. In a 2008 official evaluation of the quality and the effects of the indicators used to
produce the EDB ranking by the Independent Evaluation Group (2008: 43), the World Bank
Group’s semi-independent watchdog, staff maintained that ‘Ranking with peers provides
incentives for reforms, not the survey itself’. While the benchmark ‘scores economies based
on how business friendly their regulatory systems are’ (World Bank, 2016: 5), there is
significant scope for ‘inadequate’ regulation (based on a limited number of restrictions) to be
conflated with more ‘efficient’ regulation (Independent Evaluation Group, 2008: 32). The
image of the economy articulated in the Doing Business report thus represents regulation as a
burden on business and a constraint on economic growth, which should be reduced to a
minimum. This naturalization of a particular conception of a liberal market economy as an
organizational ideal marginalizes considerations of alternative policy practices and goals via a
narrow focus on regulatory design for the purpose of enabling business freedom.
Since the 2015 edition, the EDB ranking has been obtained through the calculation of a
novel ‘distance to frontier’ score, which aims to benchmark countries against regulatory ‘best
practice’. The score expresses the difference in performance for each country compared with
the best performance recorded by any country in each of the ten sets of Doing Business
indicators since 2005, or the third year in which data has been collected for indicators
introduced after 2005. Distance to frontier scores range from 0 (the ‘worst performance’) to
100 (‘the frontier’, or best recorded performance). The ten distance to frontier scores for each
set of indicators are aggregated into a simple average to produce an overall distance to frontier
score for each country (World Bank, 2016: 167).
While the World Bank (2016b: 164) claims that ‘The distance to frontier score captures the
gap between an economy’s performance and a measure of best practice’, it analytically
privileges fewer and cheaper restrictions as ideal ‘best practice’. For example, New Zealand
‘set the frontier’ for two of the four ‘starting a business’ indicators, with an overall distance to
frontier score in 2017 of 99.96. New Zealand requires only one procedure for starting a
business, which can be completed in half a day at low cost (calculated at 0.3 percent of income
per capita with no minimum requirement for paid-in capital) (World Bank, 2016: 165, 228).
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The country that scored worst on this indicator in 2017 is the Central African Republic, with a
distance to frontier score of 31.36. The Central African Republic requires ten procedures for
starting a business, taking 22 days to complete at significant cost (calculated at 209.4 percent
of income per capita, with a minimum paid-in capital requirement of 556.6 percent of income
per capita) (World Bank, 2016: 198).
The calculation of distance to frontier scores is underpinned by the neoliberal assumption
that less intrusive regulations and lighter compliance costs for business are an effective and
legitimate measure of economic efficiency. This serves as a form of paradigm maintenance by
determining the yardstick with which national policy performance is evaluated. Distance to
frontier scores also help to reveal how ordinal rankings can distort images of national
performance. Figure 2 shows how the overall distance to frontier scores for many G20 countries
are closely clustered. The ten ‘best’ G20 countries received distance to frontier scores in Doing
Business 2017 that ranged from 84.07–72.29, indicating that the G20 country in 10th position
was less than twelve percentage points behind the top G20 country in terms of the ‘regulatory
frontier’ parameter. Once these same scores are converted into an ordinal ranking, however,
the results imply a greater degree of variation across countries, ranging from 5th place (Korea)
to 47th (Mexico).
The image of the world articulated in the EDB ranking reproduces contested ideals
underlying World Bank assessments in country operations as value-neutral measurements of
business regulations when it comes to assigning political responsibility. These evaluations
assume that national policies, not international structures, determine the quality of local
business environments; that ‘excessive’ regulation of business impairs growth; and that
international economic integration is beneficial for domestic economic performance in all
circumstances. The EDB ranking likewise advocates domestic deregulation as a panacea and
locates the need for political change solely at the domestic level, where stubborn policymakers
and slow bureaucrats are construed as obstructing the long-overdue move toward economic
liberalization. The EDB ranking is thus used as a means to assert the authority of the World
Bank Group over economic and development policy challenges within a neoliberal policy
paradigm, while constraining the scope for debating, designing and defending alternative
national policy changes.
Nevertheless, the EDB ranking has not been universally accepted as a legitimate expert
assessment of countries’ local business environment. Scholars have identified a range of
conceptual omissions and methodological flaws in the EDB ranking, especially relating to the
contentious issue of labour market regulation (Benjamin et al., 2010: 79–87; Berg and Cazes,
2008; Lee et al., 2008: 420–426). The EDB ranking has also received substantial criticism from
a global coalition of civil society organizations, which saw the benchmarking exercise as
undermining the World Bank’s broader credibility (Stichelmans, 2014). In light of these
criticisms, two official reviews of the Doing Business report have lent support to proposals that
the EDB ranking either needs to be significantly reformed (Independent Evaluation Group,
2008: 54) or perhaps even abandoned entirely (Independent Doing Business Report Review
Panel, 2013: 4).
Because of these significant conceptual and methodological weaknesses, the EDB ranking
conveys ‘misleading policy messages that invite simplistic and potentially erroneous policy
conclusions’ (Berg and Cazes, 2008: 350). In addition to its methodological limitations, the
9
140
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
Ease of Doing Business ranking (lower = better)
Overall Distance to Frontier score (higher = better)
Figure 2. Doing Business 2017 aggregate scores/rankings for G20 countries.
Source: World Bank (2017b).
EBD ranking serves as a source of rhetorical legitimation for a neoliberal policy paradigm,
based on the evaluation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ models of national performance using
measurements and indicators that privilege free market principles. From the World Bank’s
perspective, however, the benchmark helps to promote the organization’s broader aim of
encouraging countries to more closely mirror the image of the world represented in the EDB
ranking. This image of business freedom promotes a particularistic conception of a ‘good’
economy as one characterized by minimal public grip on the actions of private businesses. Like
other development indicators produced by the World Bank, such as the international poverty
line measure and income per capita country categories, the EDB ranking defines the identities
of countries by means of ‘a hierarchical order in which some of them are placed above the
others’ (Uribe, 2015: 138).
The EDB ranking thus presents and promotes a very particular image of the world, one in
which political debates about regulatory reform are restricted to determining the operational
priorities of the supply side of national economies. What business freedom from regulatory
burdens means for different groups of workers and consumers, and the wider political
ramifications that emerge from different ways of governing business activities, is precluded.
The distributional effects and political consequences of restrictive or lax regulatory standards
are ultimately irrelevant to a standard focal point for institutional and policy reforms: reduction
of regulatory ‘red tape’ and economic liberalization in line with an ideal that endorses
competition as the primary or sole means to generate economic and social progress (see Elias,
2013). Although business regulations may be used to shield a weak economy from external
volatility, to constrain predatory business practices, or to pursue broader developmental goals,
these possibilities are not accounted for.
The OECD FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index
Many IO benchmarks aim primarily at capturing the attention of elite actors in specialist
policymaking fields, and seldom make front-page headlines or generate widespread civil
society attention. An ideal typical IO benchmark that targets a politically salient issue area but
gains relatively little publicity is the OECD’s FDI Index, which aims to measure how restrictive
countries’ statutory rules are on foreign direct investment. The FDI Index was established in
2003 to comparatively measure the restrictiveness of FDI rules on an occasional basis, and is
jointly produced by the OECD Investment Division and the OECD Economics Department.
Initially created for the years 1997, 2003, and 2006, it has been released annually since 2010.
The number of countries assessed by the FDI Index has gradually expanded from 44 to 59. In
its current format, it covers all G20 countries and current OECD members, as well as nonOECD adherents to the OECD’s Declaration on International Investment and Multinational
Enterprises.
The 2003 version of the Index measured ‘restrictiveness’ across nine sectors, calculating
country scores based on a weighted average for sector scores from FDI and trade flow data
(Golub, 2003: 93, 113). A modified 2006 version with adjusted industry scores measured
essentially the same nine sectors weighted by the sectoral composition of overall inward FDI
and trade flows for OECD countries (Koyama and Golub, 2006: 14). While the earlier versions
of the FDI Index covered four secondary and five tertiary economic sectors, the 2010 revision
of the classificatory system expanded its scope to incorporate four primary, seven secondary,
10
and ten tertiary economic sectors plus real estate. These 22 equally weighted sectors are split
into four dimensions of restrictions on foreign direct investment: (1) ‘foreign equity
limitations’; (2) ‘screening or prior approval mechanisms’; (3) ‘restrictions on the employment
of foreigners as key personnel’; and (4) ‘operational restrictions’, such as restrictions on land
ownership and repatriation of capital. The restrictiveness of countries’ policy measures are
assessed using indicators linked to the standards enshrined in the OECD Code of Liberalisation
of Capital Movements (Kalinova et al., 2010: 6).
Based on an assessment of policy measures included within these four dimensions a country
receives a score with three decimal places on a scale from 0 (= ‘open’) to 1 (= ‘closed’) for
each of the 22 economic sectors. To create an overall rating, the individual scores are translated
into a simple average across sectors, with each sector equally weighted. The shift away from
using sector scores weighted by FDI and trade flows toward a simple average removed the
relationship between the individual sectors and global economic dynamics. This seemingly
minor change in methodology in 2010 had a significant impact upon the scores for some
countries, especially those with large primary industry sectors. For example, New Zealand saw
its overall score worsen from 0.170 in 2006 (when it was rated as the 28th most open to FDI) to
0.263 in 2010 (the 42nd most open to FDI), largely as a consequence of foreign equity
restrictions in fisheries and other restrictions in primary industries in the country.
Unlike many IO benchmarks, the FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index does not produce a
formal ranking of countries’ scores but merely presents countries’ aggregate ratings in
alphabetical order. The Index therefore avoids the methodological problem of artificially
inflating the differences between countries’ positions through visual representations of
comparative performance, such as league tables and heat maps, which plague many other
ordinal rankings of national performance. Nevertheless, the country ratings assigned in the
Index establish a clear hierarchy when it comes to investment restrictions among the countries,
which centres on representing fewer policy restrictions on foreign investment as ideal and
promoting the objective of increasing the process of liberalization over time. Moreover, the
scores can be manually translated into a ranking with ease. Table 3 shows that, of the two IO
benchmarks examined here, the OECD’s FDI Index exhibits by far the greatest degree of
stability in the top and the bottom ten positions over time.
Like the EDB ranking, the FDI Index purports to measure objective national performance
but is based on contested assumptions about the benefits of open markets and the pathologies
of economic regulation. Because investment regulations that do not grant foreign capital the
same market access conditions enjoyed by domestic firms are framed negatively as restrictions,
the Index represents a national economy that is open to international investment flows as the
ideal. While the average score across the 35 OECD member states in 2016 was only 0.067,
indicating an almost complete absence of restrictions on foreign direct investment, rising
economic powers scored significantly higher, indicating a greater reliance on controls to restrict
such inflows. For example, Brazil scored 0.101, Russia 0.187, and India 0.212. China received
one of the highest scores (signalling greater restrictiveness) of the 59 countries rated in 2016,
with 0.327 (OECD, 2017). As market analysts have noted, however, there is no automatic
correlation between the restrictiveness of countries’ investment rules and actual FDI inflows
(Garry, 2013). The case of China provides an apt illustration here. Despite receiving the second
11
2014
2015
2016
Top 10
countries
Luxembourg (1)
Portugal (2)
Slovenia (3)
Romania (4)
Czech Republic (5)
Netherlands (6)
Estonia (7)
Finland (8)
Spain (9)
Germany (10)
Luxembourg (1)
Portugal (2)
Slovenia (3)
Romania (4)
Czech Republic (5)
Netherlands (6)
Estonia (7)
Finland (8)
Spain (9)
Germany (10)
Luxembourg (1)
Portugal (2)
Slovenia (3)
Romania (4)
Czech Republic (5)
Netherlands (6)
Estonia (7)
Finland (8)
Spain (9)
Germany (10)
Bottom 10
countries
Tunisia (50)
Malaysia (51)
New Zealand (52)
India (53)
Jordan (54)
Indonesia (55)
Myanmar (56)
Saudi Arabia (57)
China, People’s Rep. (58)
Philippines (59)
Tunisia (50)
Malaysia (51)
India (52)
New Zealand (53)
Jordan (54)
Indonesia (55)
Saudi Arabia (56)
Myanmar (57)
China, People’s Rep. (58)
Philippines (59)
Tunisia (50)
Malaysia (51)
India (52)
New Zealand (53)
Jordan (54)
Indonesia (55)
China, People’s Rep. (56)
Myanmar (57)
Saudi Arabia (58)
Philippines (59)
Table 3. Top 10 and bottom 10 listings in the FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index, 2014–2016.
Note: While the FDI Index does not rank countries the numerical scores produce a hierarchy of performance.
Source: Data retrieved from OECD website, available at: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?datasetcode=FDIINDEX#.
worst score in the 2014 FDI Index, in the same year the country reached the status of being ‘the
world’s largest recipient of FDI’ (UNCTAD, 2015: ix).
Furthermore, the FDI Index cannot capture differences in implementation and enforcement
of statutory restrictions across countries, nor does it measure ‘the nature of corporate
governance, the extent of state ownership, and institutional or informal restrictions’, or subnational policies (Kalinova et al., 2010: 6, 9). Thus, the Index merely constructs an image of
countries’ openness to international economic integration and gauges how close their policies
come to the OECD’s ideal type of an open economy; it is not a measure of national success in
attracting foreign investment or the degree of international economic integration per se.
The classification and coverage of different economic sectors in the FDI Index promotes an
image of the ideal economy as one that is almost entirely free from statutory restrictions on
foreign direct investment. To perform well in the Index, countries need to have designed a
national regulatory framework according to this image, with negative implications for countries
that may prefer policy alternatives. In a fashion similar to the EDB rankings, the FDI Index
privileges an image of business freedom – in this case equitable treatment of foreign investors
and domestic businesses – which encourages countries to gradually converge toward the OECD
member state average at the very bottom of the 0–1 scale of FDI openness, based on the
principle of ‘progressive liberalization’ (Williams, 2008: 125). For the purposes of composing
the Index, a policy measure that discriminates between foreign and domestic investors counts
as a restriction (Kalinova et al., 2010: 6). Policy alternatives to a liberalized foreign investment
regime, which may offer important benefits for a country’s economic performance and
development trajectory, are classified as aberrations from the norm. The implicit assumption
promoted through the IO benchmark is that such policies harm economic growth and
development, which results in bad scores.
Overall, then, the Index rests on a division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foreign investment
rules. This analytical approach contributes to the maintenance of a transnational policy
paradigm that is centred on the assumed benefits of unrestricted capital mobility for economic
growth. Its purpose is to identify statutory barriers to investment across a wide range of policy
areas encompassing primary (agriculture), secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (services)
industries, as well as rules on the acquisition of land and real estate investment. This binary
conception of countries’ rules for governing foreign investment supplements the OECD’s
general promotion, not least through the 1989 amendment to its Code of Liberalization of
Capital Movements, of capital mobility for both long-term and short-term investments
(Abdelal, 2006: 14). In this image of the world, unfettered international capital flows offer host
countries only economic benefits and no costs. Among other things, this image obscures the
potential for transnational corporations to shift taxable revenue offshore through transfer
pricing practices within ‘global wealth chains’ (Seabrooke and Wigan, 2017). The benchmark
thus sidelines the possibility that equitable treatment of foreign and domestic investors might
instead grant the former a structural advantage over the latter on what is already an uneven
playing field.
Although references to the FDI Index are common in policy conversations as well as in
behind the scenes negotiations, it does not generate many news headlines or stir much
controversy. Instead of high public visibility, the indirect power of the Index lies in its
widespread use by international organizations and governance forums. Importantly, a range of
12
additional OECD surveillance instruments make extensive use of the FDI Index, which extends
the reach of both the benchmark and the organisation itself because it helps to disseminate
OECD concepts and standards of ‘best practice’. For example, the FDI Index forms one
element of the OECD Indicators of Product Market Regulation (PMR) (Kalinova et al., 2010:
5). The PMR indicators provide international comparative measures of economy-wide policy
regimes that promote or inhibit market competition in 34 OECD and 22 non-OECD countries
(the FDI Index is used to identify barriers to investment). The PMR in turn shapes the definition
of policy priorities in the flagship OECD annual publication Going for Growth (first published
in 2005), which compares structural policy developments across OECD members, identifies
desirable economic reforms, and assesses national progress towards the adoption of
recommended policy reforms from year to year. The Going for Growth report also forms the
basis of the OECD’s multilateral assessment role within Group of Twenty (G20) working
groups. Specifically, it informs the OECD’s input to the G20 Framework for Strong,
Sustainable and Balanced Growth as well as the G20 National Growth Strategies, which were
designed as a multilateral mechanism to pursue the goal of expanding economic growth by 2
percent by 2018 through growth-enhancing reforms and the monitoring of countries’ progress
in achieving them (Schwanen, 2010).
In addition to the PMR indicators, the FDI Index is used in OECD Economic Surveys, which
are conducted every two years for each OECD member state and several non-OECD countries.
It also feeds into countries’ ‘roadmaps’ for accession to the OECD, where the OECD
Investment Committee prepares a formal opinion on a candidate country’s investment policies,
measured against OECD ‘best practice’ standards, which informs the negotiation of policy
reforms as part of the accession process. Finally, the FDI Index forms an important component
of OECD Investment Policy Reviews, which the organization undertakes in response to an
official request to evaluate a country’s investment trends and policies. Multi-agency
government task forces, regional economic communities such as the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the
New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and the World Bank Group have used
Investment Policy Reviews to shape policy reform initiatives and to signal a government’s
desire to improve the investment climate. Figure 3 depicts a simplified illustration of the
convoluted process whereby the transnational knowledge created by the FDI Regulatory
Restrictiveness Index is disseminated across multiple surveillance instruments and governance
forums.
Like the EDB rankings, the OECD’s FDI Index is part of a neoliberal transnational policy
paradigm that extols the virtues of opening up the economy and reducing the regulatory role of
the state over business activities. While global governance actors have promoted this broader
agenda in a variety of ways (Abdelal, 2006; Ban, 2016; Kentikelenis et al., 2016), IO
benchmarking practices play specific roles in disseminating and reinforcing global policy
norms by representing contested images of the world in simplified form as expert knowledge.
The FDI Index makes foreign investment regulations visible as a policy problem and thus
amenable to standardized reforms across different national contexts. It serves to bolster the
OECD’s wider efforts to advocate for the removal of foreign investment restrictions, via the
production of comparative international metrics that track deviations from the norm. When
domestic policymakers try to convince a sceptical public that liberalization is not just wise but
13
G20 Framework for Strong,
Sustainable and Balanced Growth
G20 National Growth Strategies
Going for Growth flagship
report
PMR indicators
FDI Regulatory
OECD surveillance
restrictiveness index
instruments
Economic Surveys
Reviews of candidates for accession
Investment Policy Reviews
Peer review in the Economic and
Development Review Committee
Formal opinion by Investment
Committee of country policies
compared with OECD standards
Used to evaluate national investment
policies by governments, regional
economic communities, and
multilateral development banks
Figure 3. How the OECD’s FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index is used in transnational governance processes.
inevitable because national competitiveness is at stake, they are invoking a particular
conception of the economy as the ideal. The FDI Index thus presents and promotes a distorted
image of the world by labelling regulations that might restrict investment as a policy problem
– regardless of whether they actually restrict FDI flows or how they interact with a
government’s other social and economic objectives.
IO benchmarking as paradigm maintenance
IO benchmarks make us view and engage with the world on particular terms by influencing
what problems we see in a given policy domain and how we look at them to craft political
solutions. Benchmarks can therefore misrepresent an issue as a result of construct or content
validity problems. Moreover, as the investigation of these two cases has demonstrated, IO
benchmarks sanction existing hierarchies in world politics by framing contested choices of
problem definition and conceptualization as based upon the neutral application of rationalscientific expertise. In both cases, the ratings or rankings that are obtained in the respective
issue areas are presented as objective measures of country performance; the benchmarks clearly
assign responsibility for success and failure to national authorities, rather than to broader sociopolitical structures and dynamics. And while the limited number of countries ranked at the top
and bottom take the limelight, there is little mobility at either end of the comparative
performance scales produced and promoted by IOs: the best and worst performing countries in
these two benchmarks have remained fairly constant over time (see Tables 2 and 3 above).
By holding up some states as role models to emulate while framing others as
underperformers who have to change, IO benchmarks promote images of the world as divided
into cases of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. By linking the attribution of praise and blame to
knowledge-based practices, IO benchmarking specifies ‘what is normal and desirable’ – and,
by implication, ‘what is abnormal and undesirable behavior’ (Towns, 2012: 180). The
articulation of superior and inferior qualities in IO benchmarks serves as a mechanism for
(re)producing social hierarchies among states. At the same time, it locates the causal factors
for country performance at the domestic level, thereby marginalizing sources of structural
power that might be equally responsible for the benchmarked outcomes.
Furthermore, the empirical illustrations highlight that IO benchmarks focus attention on a
limited set of data input factors. The simplistic numerical rankings that this process yields risk
narrowing the scope of political debate down to one-size-fits all checklists of the technical
adequacy of institutional design, with ticks and crosses (as in the case of the EDB ranking) to
measure the degree of conformity with what an IO promotes as global ‘best practice’. As the
above discussion shows, the promotion of a specific interpretation of highly political concepts
through the use of what is perceived as value-neutral factual evidence reinforces a set of
particularistic values as broadly accepted standards.
IO benchmarking also shapes the ways in which we assign meaning to contested and valueladen concepts such as investment restrictions and business regulation. Specifically, IO
benchmarking practices influence processes of sensemaking by either challenging or
reinforcing prevalent normative conceptions of problem definition and solution. How an issue
is articulated and operationalized in IO benchmarks fosters the development of a normative
consensus on the appropriate scope and targets of political action consistent with the agenda
14
and mandate of the organization producing them (Charnysh et al., 2015: 327–328). The ability
of IO benchmarks to shape how actors think about an issue is also closely connected to their
capacity to influence transnational processes of policy diffusion, whereby knowledge about
governance and policy fads travels around the world across political settings (Stone, 2004).
The available transnational supply of policy lessons influences how actors in a specific political
domain devise strategic interventions in an issue area and what kinds of policy changes are
prescribed or discouraged. Global benchmarks amplify and reinforce these diffusion
mechanisms while limiting the supply of alternative policy lessons.
A number of scholars have recently noted a contemporary shift within the global
development regime away from the transnational paradigm that characterized the ‘Washington
Consensus’ era of the 1980s and 1990s towards a greater focus on ‘best practices’ and
‘measurable results’ (Babb and Chorev, 2016: 94–97; see also Best, 2017; Kentikelenis and
Seabrooke, 2016). Notwithstanding the importance of these changes, our analysis suggests that
IO benchmarking techniques enable the core precepts of this transnational paradigm to be
(re)deployed as quantitative metrics of development progress. Indeed, many of the
controversial free market ideas associated with the ‘Washington Consensus’ paradigm continue
to be championed both directly and indirectly through IO benchmarks. Largely because of the
processes of simplification and extrapolation that are required to produce comparable aggregate
indicators that can be expressed numerically (Broome and Quirk, 2015a: 827), IO
benchmarking remains oriented towards a top-down grand vision of development and
economic governance even as the same organizations may embrace a more decentralized
approach in their other activities. In the two cases of IO benchmarking we have examined here,
therefore, the EDB ranking and the FDI Index serve as a mechanism of paradigm maintenance
by other means. Such benchmarks increase the staying power of existing paradigms by
obscuring specific policy positions within the application of organizational expertise. In this
respect, the EDB ranking and the FDI Index are pertinent examples of a wider global
governance trend toward the cloaking of contested political ideas and normative agendas in the
more legitimate language of objective performance measurement, numerical indicators, and
peer comparisons.
Overall, our analysis of both cases suggests that the promotion of contested images of the
world as value-neutral expert knowledge can have far-reaching ramifications when these
function to focus political attention and to attribute responsibility for outcomes. Not only do
benchmarks construct images of the world that orient attention toward certain dimensions of
an issue while obscuring others, they also direct toward national governments praise for the
‘good’ and blame for the ‘bad’ outcomes showcased by a benchmark. When they marginalize
or obscure salient factors, or when they misrepresent the degree to which national authorities
are responsible for performance in a given area, benchmarks can significantly distort political
debates and policymaking processes. The indirect power of IO benchmarking is therefore
rooted in its capacity to influence what counts as legitimate knowledge, what issues occupy
political debates, how to think about those issues, what policies are advocated, and who is
assigned responsibility for successes and failures. In short, IO benchmarking contributes to
setting the boundaries of ‘political possibility’ (Holland, 2011) by narrowing the space
available for political contestation and magnifying the social pressures on states to conform to
transnational policy paradigms.
15
Conclusion
The role that IOs play as evaluators of national policy designs, economic performance, and
social outcomes matters. This article has shown that global benchmarking practices by IOs
create prisms that shape the interpretation of national performance in world politics. But
although IOs draw upon their expert status to do so, the benchmarks that they produce should
not be understood as robust and transparent registers of success and failure. Rather, our analysis
suggests that with these prisms we see distorted images of how different countries compare in
terms of their national performance on different political issues within the limitations of a
specific transnational policy paradigm. In the two cases examined in this article, the World
Bank–IFC Ease of Doing Business ranking and the OECD FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness
Index, the principles underlying the construction of each benchmark are based on pro-market
(minimal regulation) assumptions about how economic governance ought to work.
For IOs, however, benchmarking is highly appealing. Because of the indirect power of
comparative performance metrics, benchmarks can augment other avenues through which IOs
may exercise both direct and indirect power in world politics, such as the application of material
incentives and loan conditionality or processes of socialization and stigmatization. At the same
time, it can increase the traction of an IO’s broader efforts to shift the parameters within which
national elites undertake deliberations, enter negotiations, make decisions, formulate goals, and
order priorities. Perhaps most significantly, benchmarking expands the scope of the power of
an IO to classify complex political, economic, and social phenomena, as well as to provide an
evidential basis for labelling some types of states and governance techniques as ‘best practice’
while delegitimizing others. IO benchmarks are thus integral to understanding the complex
ways in which policy norms and standards that reflect a particular transnational paradigm are
both legitimated and diffused across political settings.
In turn, the (re)production of social hierarchies between states via transnational knowledge
practices that establish ideal and pathological models of state action is underpinned by an
appeal to the authority of rational-scientific expertise housed within IOs. While global
benchmarking practices are often used by civil society organizations to challenge existing
policy paradigms in world politics (Seabrooke and Wigan, 2015), the use of benchmarks by
IOs to rate and rank national performance in the two cases examined here serves to maintain a
transnational paradigm that is centred on extolling the benefits of open markets and is critical
of the regulatory role of the state in governing economic activity. We have illustrated that
benchmarking practices by IOs both configure reputational incentives for national
policymakers to achieve a better score in global ratings and rankings, and encapsulate
appraisals of national performance within a problematic logic of comparison. Yet national
performance in a given issue area is not independent but is, at least in part, contingent upon
diverging contemporary structural conditions and historical legacies of domination. Notions of
national success and failure are thus far more relative concepts than glossy country rankings
imply.
This article has three main implications for future research on the role of IOs as actors that
exercise expert authority in world politics. First, it points to the importance of further
investigating the complex linkages that connect different modes of transnational knowledge
16
production with efforts to challenge or maintain dominant paradigms across various types of
global governance actors. In particular, more research is needed to examine how these linkages
operate through mechanisms of transnational socialization and stigmatization as well as
through transnational evaluation. This agenda for future research includes exploring how the
production of global performance metrics in one field might influence knowledge practices in
others, as well as how transnational knowledge is recursively deployed across different political
settings, and with what effects. Second, future research will need to specify the scope
conditions under which the knowledge practices of IOs enable them to legitimize claims to
issue expertise, including how the indirect power of benchmarking interconnects with other
forms of direct and indirect power. Our discussion in the final section has outlined some of the
links that larger empirical studies could investigate to gain additional insights into the
interconnections of power, knowledge, and expertise in global governance. Finally, our
research suggests that scholars themselves must approach global benchmarks with a more
critical and sceptical stance on the legitimacy of using comparative metrics to construct
evidence about comparative national performance or to track trends in a particular issue area.
Reliance on these problematic tools to construct transnational knowledge distorts how we
understand the world, as well as how we seek to change it.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Thomas R. Eimer, Juanita Elias, Jacob Hasselbalch, Joel Quirk, Leonard
Seabrooke, and Matthew Watson as well as three anonymous reviewers and the EJIR editors
for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this article.
Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme under grant agreement No 693799 and from the UK Economic and
Social Research Council under grant number ES/K008684/1.
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