Schopenhauer was right after all

Okonomos

Since today is Independence Day, it seems reasonable to focus on governance. Everyone knows it is crucial and, even we in India with our chalta hai attitudes, have begun to get worried.

So worried, indeed, that we have even set up an institute in Hyderabad to study it. Jawaharlal Nehru University, too, has a full-fledged centre for it. And not a day passes without there being a seminar on the subject somewhere in the country.

Most of what emerges from these places, however, is just plain hot air. Retired civil servants, having aided and abetted the withering of governance, hold forth to sceptical audiences who judge the quality of a conference by the lunch on offer.

A few publications emerge from time to time, only to be consigned straightaway to the dustbin. And so on.

Clearly, however, the study of governance requires a bit more than just this, and who but the World Bank to come to the rescue? In a recent draft paper*, Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi have estimated six dimensions of governance for 199 countries for 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002.

They use three key reference points. On two of the three reference points, we fail with flying colours.

Thus, one is the "process by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced" and we in India are pretty good at it.

Another is the "capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies", at which we are lousy.

And the third is the "respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them." In India, this is at best a poor joke.

From this, the authors go on to devise the key indicators of governance. These are:

Voice and accountability, which includes a number of indicators that measure various aspects of the political process, civil liberties and political rights.

Political stability and absence of violence, which consists of several indicators that measure the chances that a government will be overthrown by unconstitutional means.

Government effectiveness is about the quality of public service provision, the bureaucracy and its competence and independence and, most critically, the credibility of the government's commitment to policies.

Rule of law includes several indicators that "measure the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society. These include perceptions of the incidence of crime, the effectiveness and predictability of the judiciary, and the enforceability of contracts."

Control of corruption is about all the things we know and could set up world-class universities in. It includes the tendency of the elite to engage in "state capture".

And what do they conclude? Just this: "Interpreting these trends is difficult, but we can state with some confidence that there is little, if any, evidence of improvements in global governance over the period we consider."

That is, as Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, predicted would always happen, things are going from bad to worse.

So "a number of sources report quite substantial declines in the world averages of the six dimensions of governance. It can therefore be safely concluded that our (relative) governance estimates for a country do not underestimate absolute trends for such country, since there is no evidence of a worldwide improvement."

Few research findings, surely, can be quite as devastating as this. I cannot help wondering why the World Bank has not sought comments on it in a more energetic manner.

Instead, it has chosen to hide the paper away in its website along with a number of other working papers where one may or may not chance upon it.

It seems reasonable, though, to suggest that surveys of the sort relied on by the authors usually result in a verification of Schopenhauer's thesis.

People are usually discontented: in families, workplaces and countries. Things always seem to have worsened.

But if you allow for that, it also seems reasonable to ask "who did you ask?" or, in this case, "who did the surveys you relied on ask." One must, however, assume that the authors "" and the Bank "" have taken care of these issues.

It is a pity that research at the World Bank tends not to offer explanations. The style is to report the findings and leave it at that. This paper is no different.

More is the pity. My explanation is that the increased scope of government everywhere has resulted in these glum findings.

*Governance Matters III: Governance Indicators for 1996-2002, World Bank Working Paper No 3016, June 30, 2003