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UN agency slams Fraser Institute’s methodology… Again.

A United Nations agency is slamming the Fraser Institute’s methodology in a stinging new report. The report by the Geneva-based International Labour Office (ILO), governed by governments, employers and labour, offers a “critical overview” of labour market regulations’ indicators developed by the World Economic Forum, the Institute for Management Development and the Fraser Institute.   The groups all use […]

A United Nations agency is slamming the Fraser Institute’s methodology in a stinging new report.

The report by the Geneva-based International Labour Office (ILO), governed by governments, employers and labour, offers a “critical overview” of labour market regulations’ indicators developed by the World Economic Forum, the Institute for Management Development and the Fraser Institute.
 
The groups all use data from the World Bank’s Employing Workers Index, which was suspended in 2009 due to major conceptual flaws.
 

Pointing to the “trivial aggregation of de jure and de facto measures” and “a strong conceptual bias,” the report pokes several holes in the Fraser Institute’s Labour Market Regulations and Economic Freedom of the World indexes.

Here are some of the methodological problems flagged by the UN agency:

#1 They double count the same things:

#2 Using data from multiple sources for the same variable:

#3 Mixing and matching new components with old components leads to “wrong interpretations”:

#4 Cherrypicking which components they include and not justifying their choices:

 #5 De facto data is from Mars, De jure information is from Venus:

#6 “Military conscription” is one of the components the Fraser Institute takes into account in assessing labour market regulations:

 

#7 …And military conscription is “fully driving the overall results” of the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index

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