Assessing the State of Democracy, Market Economy and Political Management in Southeastern Europe

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Franz‐Lothar Altmann and Peter Thiery for instructive comments and suggestions.

Notes

[1] Cf. http://www.bertelsmann‐transformation‐index.de for more information, rankings and country reports. A German‐language version of the BTI results has just been published (Bertelsmann Stiftung).

[2] Due to financial and organisational reasons, countries with a population of less than three million and non‐sovereign states were not studied; ten particularly interesting smaller countries were included in the sample: Bahrain, Botswana, Estonia, Jamaica, Latvia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Mauritius, Mongolia, Namibia and Slovenia.

[3] The initial scale used to rate the level of difficulty ranges from 1 to 10, which corresponds to the scale used to rate the other BTI questions. The quantitative indicators are transformed into a 1 to 10 scale in order to aggregate them with the other components of the difficulty level. As multiplying with the resulting scale would distort the index excessively, the scale is transformed to a scale ranging from 1.0 to 1.25. The exact formula is as follows: Management Index = (difficulty level*0.028 + 0.972)*[(Σ criteria scores)/5]*10/12.5.

[4] For a more detailed explanation of how these indicators are constructed, cf. Bertelsmann Stiftung.

[5] Cf. http://www.bertelsmann‐transformation‐index.de.