The series Slave to the Blog (or STTB for short) are posts where we revisit themes and stories of continuing interest. Fortuitously, recent research from the World Bank has provided me the opportunity to flog the President Jim Yong Park Political Breakthrough contest which has garnered little reader interest. Last week it was tough to cut through the off-the-charts focus on the Pope's visit, but OK, I surrender to Higher Powers. Or maybe it’s the prize: lunch with me at the World Bank cafeteria. But the food there is actually good. Believe me.
So what has the Bank done? It released the latest version of its World Governance Indicators, a cross-national ranking of the quality of political institutions. The Bank constructs six broad indicators of governmental quality: voice and accountability; political stability and absence of violence/terrorism; government effectiveness; regulatory quality; rule of law; and control of corruption. North Korea comes pretty close to flat-lining at the bottom of the ranking in all categories.
For 2014, North Korea scores in the 1 percentile for voice and accountability, where it has more or less been since the Bank started constructing these indices in 1996.
Political stability and absence of violence/terrorism is a relative strength: North Korea is ranked in the 11th percentile (the only indicator for which it breaks out of the bottom decile) but this score represents a statistically significant fall from the 47th percentile the country reached in 2012. Apparently the World Bank, or more specifically the underlying cross-national surveys on which these rankings are based, are not big fans of the era of Kim Jong-un.
After that moment of novelty, it’s pretty much back to flat-lining in the cellar: government effectiveness, 2nd percentile; regulatory quality—the zero percentile, absolute dead last out of the sample of 215 countries; rule of law, 2nd percentile (in 2000, the country peaked in the 26th percentile, and the Bank’s calculations reveal a pretty steady relative decline since); and lastly, control of corruption, 5th percentile which actually amounts to a small, albeit statistically insignificant improvement, relative to past scores. (The absolute values of the underlying scores track the relative rankings and in this case the improvement in the raw score is also statistically insignificant.)
So what should we make of all of this? Well, the World Bank rankings are themselves constructed from a variety of cross-national surveys which are themselves problematic to varying degrees. The basic issue is that respondents are typically either asked to score countries for which they have little real information or exposure, or are asked to score only countries for which they have some genuine knowledge, raising the possibility that respondents from different regions are applying significantly different standards. In short, there is a “beauty pageant” aspect to these exercises, and they may signal more about reputation than reality. They are probably conveying some kind of information about absolute and relative quality of governance, but we shouldn’t get too carried away: i.e. we knew North Korea sucked without the World Bank telling us so.
But that is not the only North Korea-related World Bank news from last week. The Bank introduced the income of $1 per day as an indicator of extreme poverty back in 1990. The benchmark was subsequently raised to $1.25. Last week the Bank raised it to $1.90 instantly creating millions of destitute people worldwide. And depending on how you crunch the numbers, millions of them likely to be in North Korea. As one might expect, the Bank is being hammered for what some might regard as a bureaucratically self-interested move to keep themselves in business. Responding to such criticism, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim (remember him?) said that the decision was necessary due to new data on purchasing power. He was quoted in the Financial Times as stating that “We don't think we moved the goalposts. We think we simply updated the goalposts to 2015.” This statement is made for internet memes. Maybe we should have a contest for that as well.
