Assessment of natural gas supply security in Asia Pacific: Composite indicators with compromise Benefit-of-the-Doubt weights

As the global natural gas consumption cores shifts eastward, the natural gas import market competition in the Asia Pacific is increasingly intensified. This paper presents a composite index for assessing the natural gas supply security to identify the challenges and provide a benchmark for policy analysis in Asia Pacific countries. The index is based on a comprehensive set of eight indicators including resource risk, structural risk, dependence risk, geopolitical risk, market risk, liquidity risk, infrastructure risk and transportation risk. To aggregate individual indicator into one composite index, the linear and data-driven Benefit-of-the-Doubt model is adopted to estimate the importance of various sub-indicators with compromise weights. Results reveal that the gas supply security in Asia Pacific natural gas importing countries presents a general decline-up-down trends. Furthermore, the gas supply security in China, India and Malaysia have fluctuated widely, the Japan and Korea are very close and stable, while the gas supply security of each country has gradually converged during the observation period. The appraisal method and corresponding findings could provide strategic options for gas importers with different characteristics and have important implications for exploring regional joint emergency mechanism and improve regional competitiveness.