Constructing a Knowledge Economy Composite Indicator with Imprecise Data

This paper focuses on the construction of a composite indicator for the knowledge based economy using imprecise data. Specifically, for some indicators we only have information on the bounds of the interval within which the true value is believed to lie. The proposed approach is based on a recent offspring in the Data Envelopment Analysis literature. Given the setting of evaluating countries, this paper discerns a strong country in weak environment and weak country in strong environment scenario resulting in respectively an upper and lower bound on countries performance. Accordingly, we derive a classification of benchmark countries, potential benchmark countries, and countries open to improvement.