Global Political Economy Clusters: The World as Perceived through Black-box Data Analysis of Proxy Country Rankings and Indicators

Country rankings and composite indices are often used as proxies to assess a country's functional efficiency along a dimension of interest. The underlying assumption of this effort is that the proxy measure reflects, in essence, the gist or underlying trend of a country's performance in absolute terms or in comparison to other countries. In this paper we explore the world of country-oriented performance indices and rankings. First, we carry out a comparative review for a number of such proxy measures. Second, we carry out cluster analysis to ‘map’ the world through the eyelets of these proxy measures. Taking into consideration the outcomes of this exploratory data analysis, we wonder whether such proxies are mere representations of ‘performance,’ or instigators shaping the global political economy by weighing some characteristics more than others.