THE TIME DISTANCE PERSPECTIVE IN BENCHMARKING AND ITS ROLE IN DECISION-MAKING

The intention of the OECD World Forum on Key Indicators is to share the information and compare the strategies for measuring and assessing the overall “position ” and “progress ” of a certain political entity (country, region, etc.) vis-á-vis other similar entities. The novel time distance methodology proposes a new perspective to the problem, an additional statistical measure, and a presentation tool for policy analysis and debate that is readily understood by policy makers, managers, media and general public. This makes the time distance measure a very useful complementary tool for analysis and presentation of key indicators. This is not a methodology oriented towards a specific substantive problem but an additional view to many problems and applications. Also, it is not only a question of new broader theoretical concept of disparities and a novel statistical measure with extracting the additional information content from existing data. It profoundly affects also the analytical and decision-making level by providing new insights for evaluation of policy and business situations