Many countries have implemented various policies for renewable energy development ranging from setting power purchase agreements and the legislation of renewable energy requirements to providing incentives and imposing carbon taxes. The evaluation of the effectiveness of such policies, however, is fragmented, which raises a need for a comprehensive analysis. This paper aims to assess whether and how policies promoting renewable energy investment have achieved the intended goals. It employs five broadly defined criteria - market, uncertainty, profitability, technology, and financial resources - to build an index to assess respectively if such policies have helped create a market for renewable energy, maximize potential profits, reduce risks relating to the investment, develop and adopt new technologies, and improve the access to financial resources. Each criterion is reflected by three indicators. Values of each indicator are converted into ordinal values for analysis. The index not only scans comprehensively all relevant renewable energy investment policies in the East Asia Summit countries, but also provides systematic and quantitative measures to compare the effectiveness of policies in these countries with respect to the creation of market, the degree of uncertainty, the potential of profitability, the development and adoption of technology and the accessibility of financial resources. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.