Law Commons^™

Re-Construction Of Private Indicators For Public Purposes, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter studies the history of the first generation of indicators of governmental institutional quality. These (international) indicators include labels such as ‘bureaucratic efficiency’ and ‘rule of law.’ This discussion also addresses the argument that it is the reversal, and not the creation, of indicators designed to justify large-scale development policies by leading multilateral agencies that is problematic. This chapter emphasizes the importance of using alternative data sets and making raw data easily available, in order to challenge the present assumptions instead of merely aiming to validate them and the policy choices with which they are associated with.