Measurement Frontiers
« Previous EntriesWho actually won the Beijing Olympic Medal Race?
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008There is such an obsession with rankings. And being at the top in medals seems so important to so many. So much so that larger issues got overlooked during the Olympics.
And in spite of such obsession, nobody seems to get the medal ranking race straight. Who really won? Hard to tell, for unsuspecting reasons. Lets […]
Beijing Olympics and Governance: Eyes partially open?
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008The Russian invasion of Georgia, the leadership and human rights crises in Zimbabwe and Darfur, the coup in Mauritania, and even corruption in sports were some of the disparate problems touched in my last blog entry – challenges which did not get any better over the past few days while medals continue to accumulate in […]
Democracy and Development: Rejecting the Extremes
Friday, July 18th, 2008We recently released the new Governance Matters study, with its accompanying set of Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), covering 212 countries since 1996. It is no secret that this research project that I started with Aart Kraay over a decade ago is not uncontroversial, having generated debate among academics, some government officials, and within the World Bank. The data […]
‘Governance Matters’: A new blog on governance at the World Bank
Monday, May 26th, 2008With the just launched ‘Governance Matters’ blog, the World Bank has now fully joined the governance blogosphere. The idea was afoot for many months. There was initial pushback by a few higher ups. But support from many quarters and persistence prevailed, helped by the growing recognition of the importance of blogging in today’s world. And this personal blog I have hosted for a […]
Human Rights, Aid Effectiveness, and Development: a few findings for debate today, and tomorrow…
Thursday, May 15th, 2008Today, May 15th, an initiative called Bloggers Unite for Human Rights, was launched. The international NGO on Human Rights, Amnesty International, is partnering with BlogCatalog.com, the bloggers’ social network, so to raise global social awareness on this important issue. Bloggers around the world are being asked to post about human rights. Hundreds of postings […]
Rule of Law Matters: is it that shocking?
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008The National Townhall meeting on Rule of Law, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Law Day, did take place a few days ago. I was the only non-legal expert in the panel. Apparently that drew some curiosity, as I gather from the American Bar Association (ABA) story here. They write that it takes an economist to point out that Rule […]
Myth #4: From Crisis to Regulating (or Transparenting instead?)
Friday, April 11th, 2008Recall the downfall of Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat and others, in the aftermath of the vast corporate corruption scandals a few years back. Then we witnessed a push for tightening the corporate regulatory framework in the US (through SOX). It is naïve to argue now that it makes sense to return to the pre-Enron and pre-SOX regulatory framework. Or to continue […]
IT for Governing or for Governance?: From Hungary to Chile to Burma
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008‘Governing’ or managing a country more efficiently used to be the preferred and top-down interpretation of the concept of governance in the past, as discussed in my previous posting, addressing myth # 3 – which challenged some of the ‘governorexics’ and ’governoskeptics’. Through a few illustrations, let me selectively showcase how a few IT-related innovations were put to use for past ‘governing’ objectives, and lets see how applications of IT did evolve […]
Myth # 3: Governance cannot be defined?
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008In debunking the previous myth, I tried to challenge those ‘governoskeptics’ who doubt that governance and rule of law matter much for growth and development. Yet governoskeptics come in different guises; for instance there are those that do not believe that governance can be measured — I leave that claim for a future blog entry. Here I address those ‘governoskeptics’ who claim that governance is nearly impossible to define.
There are […]
Myth #2: Only Rich Countries can afford Good Governance & Rule of Law? — on The Economist’s ‘Order in the Jungle’
Thursday, March 13th, 2008“Order in the Jungle” is the title in this week’s essay in The Economist on Rule of Law and Economics (access here). Does Rule of Law really matters? — that is one essential question addressed in that essay, which draws from noted work by Sen, North, Fukuyama, Carrothers, Sunstein, Rodrik and Subramanian, Daniels and Trebilcock, and Shleifer et al, as […]
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