Growth Commission: Cohort Selection

From the archive — published in 2018 on the original Chokkablog, kept as it was written.

As a quick exercise I wanted to check how the Growth Commission's "peer group of 12 countries" had been selected. The report offer no explanation at all other than by inference - so I used the same data sources they used to create an objective list of comparable small countries.

My criteria are very simple: countries which qualify as IMF "advanced economies", ranked by size. I've added IMF 2016 GDP/Capita ($US) for comparison purposes as this is the primary measure the Growth Commission use. The highlighted countries are those selected for the Growth Commission's “peer group of the 12 most successful small advanced economies”.


The important point to make here is that this cohort has been pre-screened for success. All of those countries excluded that lie within the population extremes of those selected have lower GDP/Capita than Scotland (and indeed at both the higher and lower end, the population extremes conveniently stop just the right side of examples where GDP/Capita is lower than Scotland's).

There is nothing wrong with this as long as we appreciate that the Growth Commission is seeking to learn from successful small advanced economies. What they are unable to do from the analysis presented is draw any robust conclusions about whether or not small advanced economies are somehow intrinsically more successful than large ones.

It's perhaps unfortunate that in the introduction to the report (p10, 2.28) the Chair Andrew Wilson asserts “The evidence demonstrates that smaller countries, partly because of their greater need to respond to global challenges, produce better governance, policy and therefore living standards.” 

This may or may not be the case, but no such evidence is presented in the report.

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