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It's important to note that "the import volume of each country is used as a weighting factor". I don't know if they are referring to weighting their participant
by cyphar 9y ago
It's important to note that "the import volume of each country is used as a weighting factor". I don't know if they are referring to weighting their participants responses based on their home country, or weighting the results based on the country being ranked, but I feel this could bias the results toward countries that are heavy exporters (like Germany).
- dx034 9y agoYou have to weight countries by some factor. Using imports is probably a good idea to have a good representation of buying decisions. If you used population you'd end up with a high share for India even though they import relatively little, making the labels less important.
- cyphar 9y agoBut given that EU countries generally only import things from other EU countries (due to the tariffs), it could similarly bias towards EU countries that export to most of the EU (like Germany). That's not to say I don't agree with the general placement of countries, I just think it's interesting how many countries on the list are from the EU. [I'm also a little surprised how well Australia and New Zealand ranked. I didn't realise that we exported enough "Made in Australia" stuff to be listed on something like this.]
- danmaz74 9y ago> EU countries generally only import things from other EU countries Actually EU countries have MASSIVE imports of Chinese goods, but we also import from lots of other non-EU countries.
- danmaz74 9y agoProbably they used it to weight the opinions of importers about the exporters, not the other way around, which would't make sense. As such, US opinions would have much much higher weight than German ones. EDIT: fixed importers/exporters