allAfrica.com: Africa: Governance Index Is a Work in Progress, Rotberg Says (Page 1 of 2)

Dr. Robert Rotberg, professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, told AllAfrica about the index he is working on that will be used, among other purposes, to guide the selection committee of the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. Excerpts:

Beginning in 1999, maybe 1998, I began working with my Kennedy School graduate students in creating the governance index by using proxy measures to develop an index, not only for Africa, but for the entire world. All of those were student efforts guided by me, and none of them had the professional status nor the professional time that would enable all the statistical issues as well as the evidence issues to be worked out. Now we will have an opportunity – beginning the first of next month – to spend several years, maybe longer, perfecting the index methodology and applying it directly to the 48 sub-Saharan African countries.

Because the Mo Ibrahim Foundation is going to provide the resources.

That's part one. Part two is that Mo Ibrahim wants to use the results of our rigorous efforts to provide a credible underpinning for the Ibrahim African leadership prize.

What statistics will you be looking at?

The eight indicators are: security, rule of law, economic opportunity, political freedom – those are the important four and they're weighted more heavily than the second four, which are: educational services, health services, arteries of commerce, that is, infrastructure, and finally, empowering civil society. Those eight measurements comprise how we measure governance because that's how political goods are delivered to us as citizens. We can apply this same methodology to a city's government as well as to an African state.

How would you compare this to other measures of governance that are out there?

There aren't any. This is the only one. There's a World Bank thing, but it doesn't rank countries and it doesn't use these quite clear and transparent measures of governance. It doesn't use the political goods methodology. It uses some other method, and the big difference that people at the Bank and I have discussed at great length is we're trying to use objective measures, so there's no selection bias. By that I mean we won't use subjective measures, [such as] people's opinions.

What about the Millennium Challenge Account?

The Millennium Challenge Account is good as far as it goes, but they'll be better off using our measures when they're perfected. The Millennium Challenge Account uses Freedom House in part. Freedom House is based on interviews and opinions, including my own, about countries. There's a selection bias. Transparency International, which I revere and think is fabulous, also is based on interviews and public opinion. Index of Freedom done by the Cato Institute, again, it bases everything on opinion. What we're trying to do is go to objective measures.

What are some of the objective measures for things like rule of law or empowering civil society?

Let's take some easy ones first. There are two important things: one is that we're measuring outputs or outcomes, not inputs. To take infrastructure, you do something very simple. You compare miles of paved roadway at Time X versus Time Y. That's straightforward. That's a quantitative method. It doesn't depend on anyone's opinion. That's the simplest of all, because you can see Botswana has 1,000 times the road network that it had at independence, and Congo has 1,000 times less. You can use those as two benchmarks.

In health, you can use things like infant mortality and life expectancy. You know that Africa has HIV/Aids, so you can say, let's do this against health outcomes 15 years ago before there was Aids. You can do all kinds of comparisons. In education, you can look at persistence in school, that is, how many kids go from primary school to secondary school, and how many stay in school. Those are all measures that are, in a sense, proxy measures. In economic opportunity, you can use GDP growth. You can use raw GDP. You can use Gini coefficients. You can use all kinds of measures. There's something the IMF uses which shows how much money in the system is actually in the system or is actually in mattresses. It's called "contract effectiveness." You can use that.

But you get to security, you probably want to look at the number of violent incidents per year. If you want to look at the rule of law, you probably want to see the number of political prisoners. But I must caution you that these measures are not final yet. They're ones that my students and I have worked on, but we're now going to go from the alpha test to the beta test, and we may come up with even better measures, and reject some of the ones I've just mentioned.

How will you measure political freedom and empowering civil society?

Political freedom is freedom of expression, so you can do that very easily: how many journalists have been killed? How many are in jail? What's censorship like? You can do that with a pretty straightforward measure. If you look at the way elections are held or not held, you can look at freedom of assembly too, those key political freedoms. [We never use] the word "democracy," because we don't want to bias the sample by saying something is more democratic than not. We reject the Freedom House simplicity of "free," "partly free," and "not free," because that's too crude. We ultimately want to suggest that in Botswana there's more political freedom than in, say, South Africa. We can show those quantitatively because each of these eight indicators has, say, four to six sub-indicators. You might get 50 numbers floating around for any country.

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