Are competitiveness rankings and institutional measures helping emerging economies to improve?

Purpose – Based on the rankings of the global competitiveness index and the fragile states index, this paper aims to suggest alternative approaches to shed some light on the effectiveness of rankings in helping emerging economies improve their competitiveness from an institutional standpoint. Design/methodology/approach – The statistical analysis consisted of a two-stage analysis; the first stage consisted of constructing an updated Alternative Institutional Quality Index (AIQI), intending to design a comparative measure between dimensions over time. The second stage consisted of evidencing the structure of each of the observed dimensions' variance to evidence the existing changes or gaps o…