Contributions to Public Goods

Corporate decisions now determine the availability of goods that were once supplied, or at least regulated, as public infrastructure: payments, connectivity, energy, the information environment. The usual responses are a rating or an ethics classification, and both collapse distinct questions into a single number that hides more than it shows.

This framework keeps three dimensions analytically separate, because an actor can sit high on one and low on another. High systemic importance with high transparency is a different problem from high systemic importance with low transparency, and the two cases warrant different research and different policy attention.

The purpose is not to classify companies as ethical or unethical. It is to make corporate public-goods exposure comparable across sectors — which is precisely what regulators and the public currently lack.

Three dimensions

An observatory entry places an actor on each dimension with supporting evidence, then states the research question the placement produces.

Public dependence

How much the functioning of a public good — information systems, payments, energy, connectivity — currently relies on this actor, and how substitutable that reliance is in the short and medium term.

Systemic importance

The consequence of the actor's failure or withdrawal for the public good in question. A measure of exposure, not of intent.

Public responsibility

The degree of transparency, regulatory accountability, and alignment between the actor's public commitments and its observed conduct.

Diagnostic questions

If this actor withdrew from the market tomorrow, which public good degrades, how fast, and who would supply it instead?

Is the dependence reversible within a budget cycle, an electoral cycle, or not at all?

Does the actor's disclosure allow an outside researcher to check its commitments against its conduct — and if not, is the opacity itself the finding?

How a placement becomes a question

A telecommunications provider with high public dependence and high systemic importance, but low transparency, does not receive a grade. It receives a stated research question: whether that combination represents an under-examined public-goods risk in the jurisdiction, and what evidence would settle it.

The question is the output. Where the evidence needed to answer it does not exist — the common case, since disclosure is rarely comparable across firms — the absence of evidence is recorded as a finding in its own right.