Transfer agents, knowledge authority, and indices of regulatory quality: a comparative analysis of the world bank and the organisation for economic co-operation and development

In the past two decades, international organizations have been designing and promoting transnational benchmarks for evaluating the quality of governance. The World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development have been competing in devising and legitimizing indices across policy areas. Previous studies have demonstrated how international organizations can influence national governments by means of governance indices. However, a comparative analysis is still missing of the choices international organizations have made in establishing their own indices of good governance. By focusing on regulatory reform, this paper attempts to fill this gap. It first sets a framework to compare the different types of authority that organizations can pursue through benchmarking. It then applies this framework to the specific case of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the World Bank, to examine how they differ in their conceptions of and use of policy benchmarking.