These are hardly contentious propositions. What may prove to be more controversial are the indicators and methods employed by the Report and the "scores" assigned to different countries in the governance game.

Governance has become an important element in the package of conditionalities applied by the developed world in granting financial aid, debt relief and trade concessions to the developing countries. It would not be surprising if the governance indicators in the UNDP Report are quoted by the North in future international conferences and negotiations.

The performance of countries of the Greater Caribbean by the UNDP indicators, therefore, may well have widespread implications in their political and economic relations with donor countries and trading partners. They would be well advised to study the numbers carefully.

There are three kinds of problems that arise with the UNDP indicators. The first is that of cultural and political bias. There is an implicit assumption that western multi-party political systems are the ideal by which all countries should be measured. Hence, most of the OECD countries get perfect scores in the indicators of Polity, Civil Liberties and Political Rights.

Well-known phenomena in the perversion of these political systems by powerful financial groups and vested interests are inexplicably omitted. This would require examining factors such as the transparency of campaign financing, limits on party political funding and the impact of vested interests on economic decision-making, for example in the area of trade policy.

The developed countries also score highly in Press Freedom-notwithstanding the domination of the media by huge conglomerates and the slanted nature of much press coverage of North-South issues-and in Legal Impartiality-although it is well-known that the wealthy are much better equipped to utilize the justice system than the poor and ethnic minorities.

A second kind of problem relates to the UNDP's sources. The subjective indicators of governance rely for the most part on the so-called "In-house expert opinion" of two institutions: the US-based Freedom House and the World Bank's Governance Indicators Dataset. Supplementary data come from a dataset at the University of Maryland, from Transparency International and from the International Country Risk Guide.

The issue here is whether private or quasi-public institutions with limited or no accountability to a generally accepted system of international governance and whose procedures are not easily accessible to the global public, may legitimately be granted such huge powers of judgment over countries, populations and systems. The procedure itself may not meet the test of good governance.

A third kind of problem lies with the construction of the numerical indicators. The maximum and minimum scores vary widely for different indicators. And in some instances a higher number is better while in others a lower number is better.

For example, in Polity (degree of democracy) the range is from a maximum of +10 to a minimum of -10, while in Press Freedom the range is from 0 (full freedom) to 100 (not free). This is confusing and makes the indicators difficult to read and interpret.

Next week we will examine the trend in Human Development Indicators for the countries of the region.

Professor Norman Girvan is Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States. The views expressed are not necessarily the official views of the ACS. Feedback can be sent to mail@acs-aec.org.

(ends)

July 26, 2002