Category — Democracy

King Solomon -the wise and rich by Giovanni Demin (1789-1859)

For the past 8 years Dani Kaufman has been publishing his Governance Matters papers in which  assessment of the level of governance in countries across the world is performed. Last year he followed up with pointing out a group of 8 (ggg-8) which apparently could teach other countries around the world how governance should be done. When the financial crisis struck Dani Rodrik used the opportunity to attack Kaufmann, who he finds, puts too much weight on governance when it comes to economic growth:

“After all, no-one can deny that the United States, for all its financial follies, is a rich country.  It turns out that it is possible to be corrupt in a fundamental way and still be rich. My own view is that there was never a strong theoretical or empirical argument for relying on governance reform, as conventionally understood, as an engine of higher growth.  The case for governance reform is that it is a good thing to do in and of itself.  But don’t confuse it for a growth strategy.”

For Rodrik, who has also recently come out as a skeptic to democracy’s effectiveness in promoting growth, the active measures and policies a government implements is more important, more resembling industrial policy. In response to Rodrik the Governance Matters blog of the World Bank say that

“It is true though that the debate about the causal relation between governance and growth is open and far from reaching final conclusions -and even when evidence suggests its existence, the transmission mechanisms from good governance to growth remain unclear. This makes more relevant the analysis and diagnosis of what aspects of governance matter the most for growth -under local and more specific circumstances.   There is an agreement that the times of cookie-cutter approaches for the governance reform agenda are over.  Instead, a country-oriented approach provides the best chances to effectively link the governance reform agenda to a country’s growth strategy.”

At least one agrees that governance must be looked and evaluated at at an aggregate, national level, but there are major flaws with the way Kaufmann tries to measure governance and its effects. By subjectively setting a standard for what ‘good governance’ encompasses, one assumes that what is good governance for one country would also constitute good governance for another. This is clearly wrong. Even though Norway scores close to top on the list on most measures, adopting Norwegian style institutions would not necessarily work very well in most other countries.

For good governance, I would argue, there is no gold standard, every country has to design its system to fit its context. Moreover, one needs to take history into account and basing a governance system on what is already there. Rather than searching for Platonic ideals we should seek effective governance systems that work – very much in line with the Neo-Schumpeterian or Evolutionary approach.

Lastly, governance should be evaluated in terms of effect or result and not process. I would say China constitutes excellent governance, how would it be possible to achieve above 10 percent growth almost  every year for the last 30 years if not? This is not to argue China is an ideal democracy or that it is treating all of it citizens very fairly, but in terms of improving the life’s of its citizens it has been truly successful. By evaluating policies on the basis on results we also ensure that the debate becomes a lot less biased and ideological.

The United States is not the only place where offshore drilling has been on the political agenda during the last years. In Norway, where the offshore oil and gas industry is a significant part of the economy, making Norway the third largest oil exporter in the world, there has been debate about opening up scenic coastal areas of Lofoten and Vesterålen for offshore drilling. The Northern Norwegian coastal archipelagos feature amazingly scenic nature complete with fjords and mountains, the world’s largest population of cod along with a thriving fishing industry, and whether possible drilling in the area should be allowed to commence has already been the subject of intense debate.

Still, Norway’s Labor Party led coalition government is arguably leaning towards opening up the area for oil and gas investments, in spite of vocal protests from its Socialist Left Party members. It has certainly been  [Read more →]

As a part of its 18-month long inquiry into the causes of the financial crisis, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee on Tuesday summoned Lloyd Blainkfein and several other senior Goldman executives to answer for their role in causing the financial crisis.

According to the subcommittee, it has [Read more →]

During the year and a half since Barack Obama got elected president of the United States the country has been awash in hysteric conservative paranoia. One of the last incarnations of this amongst the conservative grassroots movements are so-called “open-carry” demonstrations. That is, demonstrations where people show up carrying rifles and loaded handguns in order to show how committed they are to the United States Constitution and American democracy.

Yesterday, one of these these rallies, [Read more →]

I was recently reading some older posts on Andrew Clavell’s Financial Crookery, and came across a post from early January on the decision made by Iceland’s President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson to let the so-called Icesave bill (with which Iceland agrees to pay back Britain and the Netherlands the deposits made by its citizens that were lost by its banks) be subject to a popular referendum that it surely would not survive. It didn’t, on March 6th 93% of voters wanted it dead, compared to a diminutive 1,6% who wanted Iceland to [Read more →]

Above: “I am *this* much more awesome than all of you guys!”
Picture from unattributable.com

Attending a small rock concert this weekend (a good one, with the Estonian band Mild), I was struck by tremendous amount of unabashed ego displayed by the lead singer of the band. Now, in the case of an aspiring rock star, this is of course not a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that a big, proud, and unapologetic ego is mostly a very good thing for a most live performers, especially [Read more →]

Picture from: http://pressthat.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/reinterpreting-islam/

Most of the links contained in this article point to Norwegian-language websites – as such I hope those of you who do not speak Norwegian and are interested in their contents make good use of Google translate. All the quotes below are translated from the original Norwegian by myself. If any Norwegians amongst you find any wrong or questionable translations, please email me and I will do my best to correct them.

During the last few weeks the homeland of Evolution-Revolution’s authors has been the stage of a fiery public debate after Dagbladet, one of the biggest newspapers in Norway, printed a picture on their front page of the Islamic Prophet Mohammed as a pig scribbling in the Koran with his trotters. However, despite its unpleasantness, the still ongoing furore following the publication has arguably been very valuable in that we have learned a whole lot about the state of immigration, integration, and Islam in Norway.

The picture in question was linked to in a post on the the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST’s) Facebook-page discussion board, amongst other posts containing highly racist remarks. After recieving a tip about it, Dagbladet wrote an article presumably meant to criticize PST for allowing a considerable amount of hateful and racist statements to be posted on their discussion board with apparent impunity. In doing so, however, they put the  - to Muslims – extremely offensive caricature in question on the front page of their print edition.

Predictably, there were heated reactions from many of Norway’s approximately 140 000 Muslims. In particular, many saw [Read more →]