Tomas Casas i Klett – författare

The Elite Quality Index 2025: The Sustainable Value Creation of Nations (EQx2025), the leading global political economy index, is a comparative ranking measuring the sustainability of nations that assesses whether elites create value and expand a nation’s knowledge capabilities or use their power to rent seek and maximize their own profits by transferring value from their stakeholders. The EQx2025 uses 149 indicators to analyze 151 countries and measures conceptual elements such as Power, Creative Destruction, and Unearned Income to determine whether the elites of a given country create or extract value from their nation. Elites are defined as those that lead a society’s most important business models and range from technology giants to labor unions, with members including business, political, and knowledge elites. Their collective coordination capacity helps them to leverage their power and influence over institutions. A nation’s elite system and its most powerful business models are essential for value creation and economic and human development. The report describes high-quality elites as those that can increase or grow the overall size of the economic pie, while low-quality elites use their power advantages to grow their own slice at the cost of others.

The Elite Quality Index (EQx) proposes an analytical framework to interpret-and possibly transform-the state of elite quality in the world's political economies. It is based on a simple idea. The EQx posits that the business models chosen and run by elites determine economic and human development. That is, elites (the "e;who"e;) affect human and economic development outcomes (the "e;what"e;), sometimes directly but mostly indirectly through the influence that they exert on the institutions (the "e;how"e;) that set the rules of the game. These rules bestow on elites a "e;license to operate."e; Both the "e;how"e; and the "e;what"e; have been theoretically discussed at great length and are amply measured. However, the EQx focuses on the "e;who"e; element, a research gap that urgently needs to be addressed. This is pursued at the national level by considering aggregate national elite systems in terms of the Value Creation and Value Extraction impacts of their primary business models. As a precursor of institutional quality, Elite Quality is deemed to be a significant pointer to long-term economic growth.The EQx is a political economy index that uses aggregated datasets to measure the overall sustainable value creation of nations in terms of the ability of its elite business models to create value rather than extract it through rent seeking. The EQx is based on a four-level architecture. Below the top-level Index rankings, there are two Sub-Indices: Power and Value. Value Sub-Index I provides direct evidence of Value Creation and Extraction by elite business models, even though the latter might be easier to capture, as the results of rent seeking are more visible. Power Sub-Index II conceptualizes the potential for Value Extraction, as this cannot exist without power. Hence, while power is not Value Extraction per se, it is a necessary condition for rent seeking to take place. In many countries, elites that enjoy a high degree of power invest in operating inclusive Value Creation business models, while in others it is used to leverage value transfers from an array of stakeholders. Both of the EQx s two Sub-Indices have a political and an economic dimension. This conceptual 2 2 framework results in four Index Areas. First, Political Power measures the capture of three kinds of rules: rules of the state, the rules of business regulation, and the rules of human labor. Second, Economic Power measures elite dominance at the firm and industry levels, such as measuring how much positive creative destruction there is in a political economy. Third, Political Value measures Value Extraction in the political dimension; the state s unearned income, its taking of income, and its giving of income. Fourth, Economic Value measures Value Extraction from the economy s three markets: products and services, the capital markets, and the labor markets. Each EQx Index Area is then assigned 3 conceptually related Pillars, yielding a total of 12. The purpose of the Pillars is to define and create conceptual lenses through which we can approach, understand, and measure specific phenomena. At the final and fourth level are the Indicators that use datasets to operationalize political economy phenomena associated with elite agency. All individual indicators and the respective weights that they are given then flow back up the framework to provide scores at the Pillar and aggregate EQx level. Descriptions of each of the 149 indicators used (what we measure) as well as the sustainable value creation (vs. rent-seeking) rationale that underpins their inclusion in the EQx (why we measure) are included in the report.The EQx2025 provides novel insights that will allow policymakers, academics, journalists, business leaders, students, and concerned citizens understand how elites are impacting the political economy of their nations while also allowing them to benchmark countries that perform well (or poorly) in terms of economic growth and human development.

The Elite Quality Index (EQx) proposes an analytical framework to interpret-and possibly transform-the state of elite quality in the world's political economies. It is based on a simple idea. The EQx posits that the business models chosen and run by elites determine economic and human development. That is, elites (the "e;who"e;) affect human and economic development outcomes (the "e;what"e;), sometimes directly but mostly indirectly through the influence that they exert on the institutions (the "e;how"e;) that set the rules of the game. These rules bestow on elites a "e;license to operate."e; Both the "e;how"e; and the "e;what"e; have been theoretically discussed at great length and are amply measured. However, the EQx focuses on the "e;who"e; element, a research gap that urgently needs to be addressed. This is pursued at the national level by considering aggregate national elite systems in terms of the Value Creation and Value Extraction impacts of their primary business models. As a precursor of institutional quality, Elite Quality is deemed to be a significant pointer to long-term economic growth.The EQx is a political economy index that uses aggregated datasets to measure the overall sustainable value creation of nations in terms of the ability of its elite business models to create value rather than extract it through rent seeking. The EQx is based on a four-level architecture. Below the top-level Index rankings, there are two Sub-Indices: Power and Value. Value Sub-Index I provides direct evidence of Value Creation and Extraction by elite business models, even though the latter might be easier to capture, as the results of rent seeking are more visible. Power Sub-Index II conceptualizes the potential for Value Extraction, as this cannot exist without power. Hence, while power is not Value Extraction per se, it is a necessary condition for rent seeking to take place. In many countries, elites that enjoy a high degree of power invest in operating inclusive Value Creation business models, while in others it is used to leverage value transfers from an array of stakeholders. Both of the EQx s two Sub-Indices have a political and an economic dimension. This conceptual 2 2 framework results in four Index Areas. First, Political Power measures the capture of three kinds of rules: rules of the state, the rules of business regulation, and the rules of human labor. Second, Economic Power measures elite dominance at the firm and industry levels, such as measuring how much positive creative destruction there is in a political economy. Third, Political Value measures Value Extraction in the political dimension; the state s unearned income, its taking of income, and its giving of income. Fourth, Economic Value measures Value Extraction from the economy s three markets: products and services, the capital markets, and the labor markets. Each EQx Index Area is then assigned 3 conceptually related Pillars, yielding a total of 12. The purpose of the Pillars is to define and create conceptual lenses through which we can approach, understand, and measure specific phenomena. At the final and fourth level are the Indicators that use datasets to operationalize political economy phenomena associated with elite agency. All individual indicators and the respective weights that they are given then flow back up the framework to provide scores at the Pillar and aggregate EQx level. Descriptions of each of the 149 indicators used (what we measure) as well as the sustainable value creation (vs. rent-seeking) rationale that underpins their inclusion in the EQx (why we measure) are included in the report.The EQx2025 provides novel insights that will allow policymakers, academics, journalists, business leaders, students, and concerned citizens understand how elites are impacting the political economy of their nations while also allowing them to benchmark countries that perform well (or poorly) in terms of economic growth and human development.

The Value Creation Ratings 2025 (VCr2025) proof-of-concept focuses on The Sustainable Value Creation of Firms and is an exploratory prototype that assesses 1,000 listed firms from the world’s leading stock markets in terms of how their business models create or transfer value.The comprehensive firm-level VCr measurement establishes the proportion of value creation in relation to revenue. A simpler second measurement, the Value Creation Position (VCp), establishes the percentage of value transfers in relation to revenue. The VCr2025 proof-of-concept report is the flagship output of a sister project to the already established Elite Quality Index (EQx2025) that assesses The Sustainable Value Creation of Nations. “Revolutionizing Risk by Weighting Value” drives VCr2025 and represents a uniquely comprehensive approach to double materiality, connecting a firm’s value creation and profit optimization with its impact on stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, capital providers, employees, regulators, nature, and academic and research institutions.In short, the VCr reports operationalize sustainability by matching the revenue of firms against their extractive value transfer-IN and inclusive transfer-OUT amounts. Value transfer-IN is “value appropriated but not created,” while value transfer-OUT is “value created but not appropriated.”A firm’s business model is assessed in the VCr2025 proof-of-concept report by 102 Sustainable Value Creation (SVC) Metrics selected because of its value transfer- IN/OUT rationale.