Ryan C Briggs
08.12.2009
I made the graph above when I was trying to find some quick and dirty empirical evidence that democratic countries in Africa exhibited better governance than their more autocratic counterparts. I divided all countries in sub-Saharan Africa into two groups based on their Polity IV score, and then calculated each group’s average number of days to start a business. The latter data set only runs from 2003 to 2008. The trend clearly holds with outlying countries (such as Guinea-Bissau, 233 days to start a business) removed and with the dividing Polity score at 4 or 6 (I didn’t check other scores). The downward trend certainly doesn’t show causation, but it does show that countries that were decently democratic in 2003 more than halved the number of days it would take to start a business from 64 to 29 over 5 years. Whatever caused it, that’s impressive.

I made the graph above when I was trying to find some quick and dirty empirical evidence that democratic countries in Africa exhibited better governance than their more autocratic counterparts. I divided all countries in sub-Saharan Africa into two groups based on their Polity IV score, and then calculated each group’s average number of days to start a business. The latter data set only runs from 2003 to 2008. The trend clearly holds with outlying countries (such as Guinea-Bissau, 233 days to start a business) removed and with the dividing Polity score at 4 or 6 (I didn’t check other scores).

The downward trend certainly doesn’t show causation, but it does show that countries that were decently democratic in 2003 more than halved the number of days it would take to start a business from 64 to 29 over 5 years. Whatever caused it, that’s impressive.
20.11.2009 [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

The most recent episode of the pop science podcast Radiolab featured an interesting discussion with Harvard professor Josh Greene on moral decision-making. Prof Greene explained some brain science (excuse my jargon) behind a problem that was earlier featured on Development Drums with Peter Singer. The problem is that most people are willing to jump into a lake and save a drowning girl even if they are wearing a $1000 suit. To do otherwise seems morally wrong. However, most people do not feel morally compelled to give $1000 to charities that do the same thing in an impersonal way.

Prof Greene ties this problem into how we evolved to process information. Tens of thousands of years of evolution have fine tuned us to respond to problems that are personal in nature. We have a part of our brain that deals with abstract concepts, even abstract threats like climate change or nuclear proliferation, but it doesn’t drive us to action as much as the oh-my-god-the-house-is-on-fire part. Greene’s argument is that it is possible that humans will culturally evolve to be better at processing and acting on abstract threats. This isn’t purely wishful thinking. This kind of change is likely happening now.

One example of our cultural evolution toward better abstraction is that over the last 100 years we have scored higher and higher on IQ tests (this finding also demolishes the idea that IQ is genetic, see here). We did not increase our scores because we actually became smarter. Rather, our culture demands far more abstraction from us than it did 100 years ago and we adapted how we use our brain. Our new ways of thinking privilege abstraction and so we score higher on tests that examine abstraction.

The crucial question is whether our enhanced ability to understand abstraction translates into action. The rising IQ scores show that we are becoming better at processing abstract information, they don’t show that we are becoming more motivated to tackle abstract problems.

If you are still reading, then you will want to listen to both podcasts.
19.11.2009
The BBC has a map of Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index for 2009. Click the image for the related BBC story. Transparency international also has an interactive flash map (you can zoom in and see per country scores) of this year’s scores. —Edit: Nov 19, 11:45am — I friend asked me a good question about understanding the TI CPI methodology. The CPI aggregates the results of 13 separate surveys of business people or country experts. The CPI is subjecive, but bias should be lessened by aggregating the opinions of different groups of people. You can find a good .pdf file here that compares various indicators and indexes of governance and institutional quality.

The BBC has a map of Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index for 2009. Click the image for the related BBC story. Transparency international also has an interactive flash map (you can zoom in and see per country scores) of this year’s scores.

—Edit: Nov 19, 11:45am —

I friend asked me a good question about understanding the TI CPI methodology. The CPI aggregates the results of 13 separate surveys of business people or country experts. The CPI is subjecive, but bias should be lessened by aggregating the opinions of different groups of people. You can find a good .pdf file here that compares various indicators and indexes of governance and institutional quality.
17.11.2009

“The key to success in academia is coming up with a big idea—a paradigm shift—and then ensuring that only your name is on it. The key to success in government is being able to break down a big idea into manageable chunks, and then ensuring that other people think that each chunk was their own idea.”

&mdash Anne-Marie Slaughter, answering a question on what her work in government has taught her about the differences between government and academia.
12.11.2009

World Bank data in Google

Today Google started including 17 World Bank world development indicators in its standard search results. Relevant search queries, like one above, not only present the World Bank data, but also present graphs of the data.

This seems to simply be the result of the World Bank making their data available through a public API, and Google being smart enough to take advantage of it.

You can read a Google blog post on the integration here. Major kudos to the World Bank and Google for pulling this off. Now we just need to get the other 800 indicators (and data from other government-funded organizations) online.

09.11.2009

The Zedillo Report

Two days ago I attended the Washington, DC launch of the World Bank’s report on internal governance, headed by former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo. You can download the report here.

The executive summary does a good job overviewing the report and is quite readable, so I’ll only briefly mention a few of the key recommendations:

  • The World Bank Group’s Board should shrink from 25 to 20 chairs. European countries should give up 4 chairs in this process.
  • Voting power at the IBRD should be decoupled from IMF quotas and non-donor countries should have a larger share of voting power (ideally around 12%).
  • Approval of all financing should be transferred to management. As it stands now, the Board has a say in financing, which prevents the Board from providing impartial oversight. No one wants to say something is wrong if they are partially at fault.
  • The standard unwritten rule where a US national is always president of the World Bank and a European national is always managing director of the IMF should be abandoned.
  • The Board should have to produce an annual review of the performance of the World Bank president.

The launch event featured a panel discussion with president Zedillo, Nancy Birdsall, Moisés Naím, and Arvind Subramanian. I was pleasantly surprised by how fast Moisés and Arvind cut to the core problem with the report: implementation.

While Moisés frequently called the report the best document he has seen on World Bank governance in over 20 years, he also clearly thought the plan was not implementable. How exactly does one convince the European countries to give up 4 Board seats? How would Obama sell the US giving up its ‘right’ to the presidency of the World Bank to the American public? These are important questions that the report does not address, and the result is that the report ends up reading like a comprehensive wish list. The lack of focus on implementation is unfortunate because the plan itself really seems quite well put together.

Nancy defended the report, arguing that now that a plan exists activists can focus on pressing for change. I can’t help but side a little more with Moisés though. I’d rather have a less than ideal report that can be implemented than a perfect plan that gets filed away.

You can find more commentary on the report here and an interview with president Zedillo about the report here.

06.10.2009

Best Flag Ever

That’s the flag of the Benin Empire, a pre-colonial African state situated in modern Nigeria that lasted from 1440 until 1897. (via kottke & andre)

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