The measurement of institutional characteristics of nations: Methodological considerations

A major barrier to the quantitative investigation of interactions between economic and non‐economic influences in economic development is the lack of adequate indicators of institutional traits of nations. Our purpose in this paper is to consider the methodological procedures involved in the development of qualitative sociopolitical and economic indicators.

The first sections of the paper deal with various aspects related to the subject of measurement. This is necessary because misconceptions regarding the nature of ‘qualitative measurement’ are common, and misleading contrasts between qualitative and quantitative measurement are frequently made. The last four sections illustrate the procedures for the measurement of institutional indicators by applying them to the quantification of the concept of political participation in developing countries.     

State fragility and failure as wicked problems: beyond naming and taming

Conceptualising state fragility and failure as a wicked problem set reveals the complex, ill-defined and interdependent nature of the reality behind these labels. This essay builds on the contributions to this special issue by examining why the fragile/failed state concept remains in good currency despite its analytic weaknesses. The discussion reveals that the parsing of state fragility into its component parts and the development of related indicators reflect efforts to tame the wickedness of the problem set; this has led to peace-building and state-building interventions whose plans and actions do not effectively take account of what is necessary to achieve their intended aims. A better problem-solving match would look beyond naming and taming, incorporating lessons from the implementation literature and international development practice. However, achieving this would depend upon the political will of both labellers and the labelled.     

A capability analysis of Rwandan development policy: calling into question human development indicators

This article provides a capability analysis of Rwandan development policy. It is motivated by impressive progress on human development indicators in combination with highly centralised policymaking, giving ambiguous signs regarding a capability approach. It is based on extensive original empirical material, along with large numbers of official documents and academic sources. The analysis is structured around three issues that concern the relation between individual agency and government policy, and that are debated among capability scholars as well as in relation to Rwandan development policy: participation, transformation and paternalism. The finding that Rwandan development policy reflects an approach very different from a capability approach is not surprising, but establishes that the assumed link between human development indicators and the capability approach needs to be questioned. This brings our attention to shortcomings in any quantitative measurements of development, or in the use of and importance attached to them, as well as to the problem of assuming that certain outputs go hand in hand with certain processes. While this is valid for contexts far beyond Rwanda, it also sheds light specifically on the polarisation that exists in the scholarly debate on Rwanda.     

Beyond the War on Terror: Into the Fifth Generation of War and Conflict

Fifth generation warfare has arrived and is irreversibly changing the character and nature of human conflict. It confronts the United States with the evolving strategic dilemma of not only dealing with the War on Terror, but of simultaneously crafting strategies that look beyond military preparedness for past wars and embrace the perspective of national preparedness for the spectrum of future conflicts. This article uses four essential elements of war—the new domains of conflict, the changing nature of adversaries, the changing nature of objectives, and the changing nature of force—to build a generational typology of war and conflict that informs the characteristics of fifth generation warfare. The resultant model produces two outcomes: First, it demonstrates how recent events such as the rise of computer hackers, the 2001 anthrax and the 2003–2004 ricin attacks, the 2004 Madrid bombings, and the emergence of Al Qaeda demonstrate characteristics of fifth generation warfare. Second, it illustrates the way in which these events are unique indicators of a future in which non-state entities are increasingly able to wage war on equal footing with nation-states. The article concludes that the United States must embrace fifth generation warfare if it is to successfully confront these threats that have taken on new and heretofore unimagined forms in the postmodern era of war.     

PERFORMANCE INDICATORS AND MANAGEMENT PERFORMANCE IN NATIONALIZED INDUSTRIES

Tracing the links between managerial performance and performance indicators reveals the limited quality of information provided by those indicators. There are two reasons. First, aggregate indices in their composition and assumption provide only a starting point for analysis and evaluation. Second, the political context inhibits publication of informative indicators of the kind which a competent organization might use for internal purposes. Part of the problem resides in misapplication of a private sector analogy. We conclude that both understanding of the nature of managerial performance in nationalized industries and conditions for working towards a more appropriate evaluation have been largely lacking in the public forum.     

Socioeconomic change and suicide: a time-series study from the Republic of Ireland

This ecological study examined the association between seven socioeconomic indicators (GDP, unemployment rate, female labor force participation rate, alcohol expenditure, marriage rate, percentage of births outside of marriage, and indictable crime rate) and total, male, and female rates of suicide and suicide plus undetermined death in Ireland during the period 1968-2000. Analysis of the data expressed as absolute values showed highly significant associations between the socioeconomic indicators and the total, male, and female suicide rates. However, these associations were explained by the strongly trended data. The trended nature of the data was removed by using year-to-year differences. Analysis of the first-differenced data showed that none of the socioeconomic indicators was associated with the total, male, or female suicide rates with the exception of indictable crime, which had a significant independent effect on the female suicide rate (coefficient = 2.0, p < .01) but not on suicide plus undetermined death. This study highlights the need to use econometric methods in time-trend analyses, the lack of age-sex specific exposure data in this area, and the challenge of understanding trends in suicide in their socioeconomic context.     

Criteria for developing performance measurement systems in the public sector

The United States Government is placing increased emphasis on the development of financial measures, and measures of program effectiveness. The authors discuss government efforts in these areas. Various approaches and criteria are presented for the development of performance measurement systems, as well as generic criteria for selecting performance indicators, and obstacles to the process. Experience indicates that development of a performance measurement system is best served by a strategic planning approach with top management support, active management participation in goal setting, a small manageable number of goals, a strong link with the budget process, and an independent evaluation process.     

Can agricultural intensification help attain Sustainable Development Goals? Evidence from Africa and Asia

Market-oriented agricultural intensification is a major development strategy, yet its alignment with sustainable development goals (SDGs) is unclear. We apply indicators for SDG 2 (eradicate hunger) regarding income, food production, food security and land tenure to recent intensifications in Rwanda and Laos to reveal their disaggregated impacts. We find while market-oriented intensification may generate poverty reduction, it also exacerbated marginalisation and poverty through various forms of land tenure insecurity. Ethnicity and gender were influential factors in Rwanda, and post-conflict resettlement policies in Laos. We discuss implications for development practice and selection of suitable indicators to reflect the ambition of the SDGs.     

SOCIAL CAPITAL,ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT,AND THE QUALITY OF GOVERNMENT: HOW INTERACTION BETWEEN SOCIAL CAPITAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AFFECTS THE QUALITY OF GOVERNMENT

This study investigates the relationship between social capital and governmental quality by considering the relationship between social capital and economic development in a cross‐section of countries. It is shown that countries with both high levels of social capital and economic development exhibit higher quality of government as measured by government effectiveness, rule of law, impartiality, professionalism, and a governmental quality index. It is also shown that countries with both high levels of social capital and low levels of economic development are associated with higher governmental quality as measured by professionalism. These findings question the use of heterogeneous indicators for governmental quality and show that the relationship between social capital and the quality of government depends on the level of economic development. Thus, the importance of the level of economic development in explaining the variation in the quality of government sheds light on the social capital theories of governmental qualities.     

CHASING SHADOWS? PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT OF POLICY ADVICE IN NEW ZEALAND GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS

Performance measurement is an integral part of the New Zealand model of public management, as it is for many other modern systems of governmental administration. This article examines data on performance indicators for the policy advice function in five government departments, for the years 1992 to 2005, to determine which types of indicators are used, and to gauge the extent to which they offer meaningful information about the quality of policy advice. As part of its managerialist drive in the early 1990s, the government developed conceptual material designed to improve policy advice and management in departments. In general, our findings indicate that these initiatives did not lead over time to the further development of genuinely meaningful measures of the quality of policy advice, and that the indicators that have been used meet narrow managerial rather than broader political needs.     

Economic development policy in Taiwan: achievements,challenges, and implications

This study examines Taiwan's economic development experience and identifies major achievements and challenges. The study first provides an overview of the past development record by analyzing several key economic indicators. It then explores major factors contributing to economic development, including general social background and supporting economic conditions as well as government development policy and activities. The paper especially focuses on changes and challenges resulting from the implementation of internationalization and liberalization of economic policy and the introduction of political democratization since the 1980s. The paper concludes with the implications of Taiwan's achievements and challenges.     

Women’s Empowerment and Wellbeing: Evidence from Africa

We use household survey data from Senegal to model the effects of empowerment within the home on married women’s wellbeing. The estimated effects of empowerment are at least as large as more conventional development indicators, such as household income. The size of the empowerment effect is robust to alternative estimation techniques, including an Instrumental Variables estimator.     

Revisiting the Meaning of Development: A Multidimensional Taxonomy of Developing Countries

Many have challenged the use of income per capita as the primary proxy for measuring development since Seers’s seminal works. This article continues this tradition with a more recent twist. We use cluster analysis to build a multidimensional taxonomy of developing countries using a set of indicators covering four conceptual frames on ‘development’. The value-added of the article is not to suggest that our classification is the end in itself, but – more modestly – to demonstrate that more work on taxonomies is required in light of the weakness of classifications based solely on income and the changing distribution of global poverty.     

Social indicators and welfare measurement: Remarks on methodology

The impossibility of measuring social conditions as one overall aggregate has to be recognized: it is only the three distinct ‘'aspects’ of social conditions which can be considered conceptually measurable. They are: (1) demography (2) social relations and (3) welfare. Each of them must be measured in its own way. This paper is concerned with elaborating a methodology of measuring welfare by means of indicators and indices, based on observable and measurable facts. Welfare indices are supposed to serve not only for assessing the results of development but also as targets for development plans.     

Political Democracy: Conceptual and Measurement Traps

The movement toward democratic political systems in many nations in the 1980s has renewed interest in measurement of political democracy. This paper calls attention to the problems that surround both the definition and measurement of political democracy. The main conceptual problems are the failure to develop an adequate theoretical definition of this concept, the confounding of the concept with others, and treating democracy as a binary rather than a continuous concept. Four problems of measurement are: invalid indicators, subjective indicators, ordinal or dichotomous measures, and the failure to test reliability or validity. The paper offers several suggestions to improve measurement as well as a warning about the danger of repeating past errors. Kenneth A. Bollen is a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His major research interests are in international development and statistics. He is the author ofStructural Equations with Latent Variables (1989), published in John Wiley's Series in Probability and Mathematical Statistics.     

Patterns of Romanian and Bulgarian Migration to Spain

The main purpose of this article is to establish to what extent migration from Bulgaria and Romania to Spain first, has a temporary and circulatory or a long-term and permanent nature, and secondly, responds to family or individual strategies. Several indicators are analysed: demographic composition; family reunification processes; migratory strategies within the family framework; the age of immigrants' children; and the frequency of movements between the destination and origin. The article demonstrates that many immigrants do not follow family reunification strategies but rather adopt individual strategies and that long term migration is the predominant pattern.     

TOWARDS STANDARDS FOR THE PUBLICATION OF PERFORMANCE INDICATORS IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: THE CASE OF SCHOOLS

Since the 1990s, the media and public authorities in many developed countries have published data on the quality of public services such as schools, hospitals and police. In the education sector the publication of performance indicators and league tables generated considerable debate. In this article, the policy context of this development in the education sector is analysed in conjunction with the problems associated with the public reporting of school performance indicators. This is followed by a discussion of the need for an accepted set of publication standards. The aim of this article is to initiate a debate about whether international consensus can be reached on the content of such a set of standards, and whether a particular set of standards, developed in the Dutch context, is applicable in and relevant to other countries. These Dutch standards have been applied to a variety of English, American and Dutch publications. The results of the analysis suggest that if the Dutch standards were applied, school performance publications could be significantly improved.     

Socioeconomic development,infant mortality and fertility: A cross‐sectional and longitudinal analysis of 63 selected countries

Data from 63 selected countries of the world at two different points in time, 1958 and 1968, are used to test a path model in which infant mortality acts as an intermediate variable between two composite indicators of economic and social development and the fertility rate. The model is tested with both cross‐sectional and longitudinal data. In order to ascertain the appropriate time dimension in which the independent variables influence the trends of fertility, the results from an instantaneous model are compared with those from a lagged effect model.     

Including Older Adults in Development Goals: Is Subjective Wellbeing the Answer? A Case Study of Older South Africans

Measures of subjective wellbeing are gaining importance as indicators of overall societal progress, yet the majority of studies come from higher income countries. This paper explores the relationship between human development indicators and measures of subjective wellbeing among persons aged 50-plus in South Africa. Using the first nationally representative population-based study of older South Africans, WHO Study on global AGEing and adult health (WHO SAGE), this paper adds to a small but growing literature on subjective wellbeing in lower-income countries. Results indicate that education, socio-economic status and health are, in fact, correlated with measures of subjective wellbeing, but the relationships and strength of the relationships differ depending on the measure used to assess wellbeing.     

The Violence of Aid? Giving,power and active subjects in One World Conservatism

Abstract

Using ?i?ek's theorisation of power, we analyse the UK Conservative Party's Green Paper on international development, ‘One World Conservatism’ (OWC). We argue that by placing the West's giving of development aid as something beyond politics, on the moral high-ground of self-evident certainty, it acts to deflect attention from critical engagement with the nature of globalisation, power and aid itself, hiding both economic and epistemological violences behind the apparently benevolent act of giving. An analysis of the nature of the green paper demonstrates the ways in which it draws in UK citizens as active subjects complicit with this vision of the world.