Unfortunately, I don’t think that simply excluding smaller countries would be a valid approach. This would lose important data and potentially unfairly exclude smaller countries that are consistently over (or under) performing. And it would potentially distort the true relationship between different predictors and EAs per capita, when we’re trying to interpret the pattern of results.
Below, I’ve shown the rank-order correlations between EAs per capita across years, which are reasonably strong- there is some real consistency, as I noted above- but not amazing, as we see in my plot above.
I think, on the whole, simply looking at the highest EAs per capita countries within a given year is a risky endeavour for the reasons above, and it’s better to look at patterns across years and across the full range of countries.
Thanks Oscar!
Unfortunately, I don’t think that simply excluding smaller countries would be a valid approach. This would lose important data and potentially unfairly exclude smaller countries that are consistently over (or under) performing. And it would potentially distort the true relationship between different predictors and EAs per capita, when we’re trying to interpret the pattern of results.
Below, I’ve shown the rank-order correlations between EAs per capita across years, which are reasonably strong- there is some real consistency, as I noted above- but not amazing, as we see in my plot above.
I think, on the whole, simply looking at the highest EAs per capita countries within a given year is a risky endeavour for the reasons above, and it’s better to look at patterns across years and across the full range of countries.