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Table 3.1 Descriptive statistics for the Release of Information Index, 1960–2005
increase in data coverage over this time, the proportions were taken by dividing a country’s raw score in time t for each database by the number of categories that had data for at least one country for that year.iv
A final caveat was also imposed at this stage, whereby a score was only registered for a country if it was an independent nation in that year. That is, if a country was still a colony at some point between 1960 and 2005 (or, indeed, did not exist at all), then they were omitted from the analysis for the years they were not an independent nation.
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Table 3.1 below presents some brief descriptive statistics for the RI index between 1960 and 2005, while Table 3.2 lists the top and bottom ten countries, averaged between 1960 and 2005. As can be seen, Canada has the highest average score over the period, while the remainder are dominated by OECD countries. The bottom of the list includes countries from Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific.
Data Quantity versus Quality
One potential criticism of this index is that this simple ‘count’ measure may ignore the fact that quality is likely to be an equally, if not more important, issue. For example, a government that may wish to hide or
Table 3.1 Descriptive statistics for the Release of Information Index, 1960–2005
Release of Information
Mean 0.52 Median 0.53 Maximum 0.91 Minimum 0.02 Std. Dev. 0.19 Number of countries 175 Observations 6,874
