COMPOSITE INDICATORS CONDITIONED TO DISCONTINUOUS SPACES: CAPTURING THE SPATIAL HETEROGENEITY OF THE COSTS OF DOING BUSINESS IN G20 COUNTRIES

This study examines multidimensional approaches to the costs of doing business that homogeneously address the importance of costs across countries. In discontinuous international contexts, geographic contiguity matrices can be uninformative. The Discontinuous Spaces Conditioned Cost of Doing Business Index (I-CFN-CED) is proposed, comparing the Benefit of the Doubt (BoD) and the Ordered Weighted Average (MPO) with country-specific weights. Robustness is assessed by correlation with GDP per capita, extracted mean variance, Shannon entropy, Mahalanobis distance, and ranking uncertainty. The MPO with a mild positive bias showed greater ranking stability and better balance between the criteria, although the informational loss recommends caution in interpretation.