Hi there and welcome back. Last week, we saw how the World Bank became convinced of the centrality of good governance in the question of economic development in poorer countries. We saw how it defined good governance and how it measured it. And we looked at how social scientists tried to link some of the dimensions of good governance, democracy, the rule of law and corruption to the question of economic growth. Well, this week we're going to focus our whole attention on the question of economic development and development assistance. In this video, we'll start with a look at the concept of state failure. After all, this is the nightmare scenario of a failure to accomplish economic development. In the video after that, we'll look at the question of who gives aid to whom and why to quote the title of a well-known article. But since that follows the big money flows, we'll look at the next video of the main aid donors not in terms of absolute size but in terms of their generosity in relation to GDP. And, then, in the final video, we'll turn our attention to the crucial question of whether you can promote good governance through the medium of foreign aid. The current fixation with state failure dates from the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union and problems, at the same time, in Haiti, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, and Cambodia. A failed state, it was argued, pose three challenges. A challenge for its own citizens deprived of the public goods they could expect from a state. A challenge to the neighbors that might be caught up in any spillover effects, not least from the refugees. And a challenge to the international community, since failed states offered a lawless space where crime and, especially after the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001, crime and terrorism could flourish. Yup, after 9/11, failed states were labeled the most powerful threat to American security. And the World Bank was right there to help. It established a Low Income Countries Under Stress program, LICUS for short, to tackle the question of state failure. And once we have a problem you can be sure that someone's going to try to measure it. One of the most prominent measures is a Failed State Index compiled jointly by the influential magazine, Foreign Affairs, and the Fund for Peace. And, it was first published in 2005. It's a composite index composed of 12 components with an average of 14 separate elements in each. Half of the components referred to social and economic indicators and the other half to political and military indicators. The compilers of the index tell us that it's constructed by data mining searching millions of documents using sophisticated computers to quote the results. Now, data mining is a useful technique involving searching and analysis of vast quantities of data, often without questions in advance, to throw up rather unexpected relationships or hotspots for further research. But I'm less sure of its use in compiling an index where everything is reduced to one number. But let's get back to the index itself. Each component is given a score out of 10. Scores are then added so a maximum is 120. The higher the score, the more failed is the state. And it would be no surprise for you to learn that Finland is the least failed state in the world and Somalia, the worst. Now, there are several criticisms that we can make of the index and, I confess in advance, I don't like this index. The first problem lies in the source of the millions of documents: the BBC, the CIA, CNN, New York Times, and National Public Radio. They're all English language American or British sources. Now listen, analyzing millions of documents might remove the danger of systemic bias but not when the selection itself is biased. Secondly, there's no attempt to define failure. Is it measured in terms of sovereignty? That the state fails when it cannot control the presence of troops or insurgents? Or is it measured by the ability of the state to fulfill its functions in the provision of public goods? The Failed State Index solves this problem by incorporating all of these dimensions. But in solving this problem, it creates another. The index is awfully cluttered. Some of the elements could be seen as consequences of failure: refugees, out-migration, external intervention, reduced state legitimacy. Some of the items, on the other hand, provide only a context. At least three, and possibly 5 of the 12 components are actually derivatives of poverty. But being poor doesn't automatically lead to state failure. And, yet, fully 70% of the countries covered in the index are now classified as being less stable or worse. Now this conflation of context, cause, and consequence in the same index limits its ability to predict state failure. But that is the ambition of the index, is to do exactly that and therefore help prevent it. Well, let's have a look, as late as 2011 there were 47 countries more likely to fail than Syria. And, as late as 2013, there were whole 116 countries in greater danger of failure than the Ukraine. A better, but less well known index, is the Global Peace Index constructed by an independent think tank allied to the Economist Intelligence Unit. It measures the peacefulness of a country, internally, which approximates stability or fragility and, externally, which refers to the state of its international relations. Only the first part of the index is relevant to us and the authors kindly released the results to us for this video. It, too, is a composite index but based on a limited number of verifiable sources. You might not like what's used but at least you know what's used. The main advantage of it, it's much more real. It deals with things like crime, death, terror, and the activity of the internal security forces all the kind of things that we would associate with an endangered state. Well, we'll look at the results of both of these indices in a separate visualization. So in this video we've described the rise of state failure as a policy concern. And we've looked at two approaches to measuring it. Let me say one thing state failure is a complex issue. In almost every case, what could not have been anticipated in advance, could always be explained afterwards. So I'm not really surprised at the weakness of attempts to measure the chances of failure without knowing the outcomes. In the next video, we're going to turn our attention to the international aid effort. Meanwhile, we'd like to invite you to look at the visualization of these two indices of state failure that we prepared on a world map for you. And, I look forward then to seeing you in the next video.
