Optimistic, pessimistic and stochastic: Robust ranking of national energy-transition performance over a common weight polytope
İyimser, kötümser ve stokastik: Ortak bir ağırlık politopu üzerinde ulusal enerji dönüşümü performansının sağlam sıralaması
This paper is being revised before resubmission. The journal name and full text will be added after acceptance.
Abstract
Composite indices of national energy-transition performance inform investors and policymakers, yet their rankings depend on contestable weights. This paper evaluates 84 countries on seven criteria for 2025, the latest year with complete data: carbon dioxide emissions per capita, their change since 2015, emissions per unit of output, the carbon intensity of electricity, the share of wind and solar power, its change since 2015 and the effective carbon tax rate. All analyses use one common weight polytope in which each criterion carries between 5% and 35% of the weight. On it I compute optimistic and pessimistic benefit-of-the-doubt scores by linear programming and the full rank distribution by stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis with 100,000 hit-and-run weight vectors. Six countries are in the top ten under 95% of admissible weights and six in the bottom ten, but the average country moves by 26 positions across the polytope. I show that the holistic acceptability index with linear meta-weights is an affine function of the expected rank; in the data it reproduces the equal-weight ranking, whereas optimistic scores reorder the middle of the distribution. For Türkiye, ranked between 33rd and 68th, a carbon price of US$70 per tonne would raise the expected rank from 48 to 25, against 38 for ten more percentage points of wind and solar power; with both and a 25% cleaner power mix it would rank in the top quartile under 83% of admissible weights. Rank ranges and acceptabilities, rather than single ranks, give a defensible basis for benchmarking.
Keywords
Multiple criteria analysis; Stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis; Benefit of the doubt; Composite indicators; Energy transition; Hit-and-run sampling; Robustness
Open code and data
Loading code…