Sanjeev Sanyal Slams Global Rankings, Calls For Reform Beyond North Atlantic Influence

Sanjeev Sanyal, economist, author, and member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, has criticised global rankings on democracy, media freedom, and other subjective issues, pointing out their flawed methodologies.

Writing for the Financial Express, Sanyal emphasises that these rankings are far from harmless — they have significant real-world implications. They influence sovereign ratings, academic research, and geopolitical narratives, making it crucial to critically analyze and deconstruct them.

Sanyal highlights that a key factor lending legitimacy to these rankings is their inclusion in the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) hosted on the World Bank’s website. The WGI is described as “a global compilation of data capturing household, business, and citizen perceptions of the quality of governance in more than 200 countries.”

However, Sanyal reveals a lesser-known fact: the WGI is not actually owned by the World Bank but by two researchers, Daniel Kaufmann and Aart Kraay.

The World Bank merely hosts the WGI, disclaiming responsibility for its content, while Kaufmann and Kraay, who predominantly rely on North Atlantic institutions, dictate the methodology and choice of sources.

In recent years, representatives from various countries have questioned the inclusion of the WGI on the World Bank’s website, but their concerns have gone unaddressed.

Sanyal argues that this arrangement creates a self-reinforcing cycle: once these indices are legitimised by the World Bank, they quickly permeate academia, media, and government documents, becoming widely accepted despite their questionable foundations.

“Eventually, it ends up as received wisdom in college essays and everyday conversations that no longer look back at the primary evidence. The whole edifice may be based on a single point of legitimacy, but the ordinary person will think, ‘surely they cannot all be wrong,’” writes Sanyal.

Comparing the system to a money-laundering operation, Sanyal argues that it allows a small group of actors to shape global narratives with minimal oversight.

He concludes by emphasising the need to challenge this system and to consider alternative global rankings from diverse sources outside the North Atlantic sphere.