Latest Resources
Measuring the rule of law: Indices of rule of law: a critical review
Article / Working Paper, Justice, Academic/Think TankThis paper offers a critical review of seven indices of rule of law. Based on a coherent framework, the comparative evaluation addresses some of the most crucial aspects of measures, namely their focus and scope, conceptualization, measurement, and aggregation. The paper proceeds in four parts in which the indices’ focus and scope (after a short description),...
Foreign Direct Investment and Civil Rights: Testing Decreasing Returns to Civil Rights
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Europe and CIS, Human Rights, Justice, Latin America and the Carribean, Academic/Think TankIn this paper, the effectiveness of improvements in political and civil rights for attracting foreign direct investment flows (FDI) into democracies is examined. The author contends that advances in the quality of democracy – specifically those concerning civil rights – present positive but decreasing marginal returns in attracting FDI inflows. This is empirically proven by using...
Стратегии институциональных реформ: Китай и Россия (Institutional Reform Strategies: China and Russia)
Article / Working Paper, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and CIS, Justice, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThis is the second part of the work devoted to the problem of the choice of institutional reform strategies. In the first part a concept of a promising trajectory was introduced. This is a trajectory that has good chances to be successful since it meets a number of requirements; their list was discussed in detail. In this paper, proposed analytical tools are used to compare reforms in Russia and...
Democracy and Growth Reconsidered: Why Economic Performance of New Democracies is not Encouraging
Article / Working Paper, Democracy, Justice, Academic/Think TankThere are two innovations as compared to the previous literature on democratization and growth. First, not only the level of democracy is taken into account, but also changes in this level in the 1970s-1990s as measured by the political rights indices of the Freedom House. Second, the distinction is made between the rule of law and democracy. The rule of law is defined as the ability to...
Response to ‘What do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Human Rights, Justice, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThis article, published in the European Journal for Development Research is a response to the article “What do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?” by M. Thomas (2009) where he dismisses the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) as an ‘elaborate and unsupported hypothesis’ because of the failure to demonstrate the ‘construct validity’...
What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Human Rights, Justice, Academic/Think TankThis journal article from the European Journal of Development Research discusses the ‘construct validity’ of qualitative measurement techniques that policymakers and researchers use, as they focus more on the question of the impact of governance in economic development. A number of measures of the quality of governance have been created. Among these are the...
Judicial Ingroup Bias in the Shadow of Terrorism
Arab States, Article / Working Paper, Justice, Academic/Think TankThis study examines ingroup bias - the preferential treatment of members of one's group in naturally occurring data, where economically signi cant allocation decisions are made under a strong non-discriminatory norm. Data come from Israeli small claims courts during 2000-04, where the assignment of a case to an Arab or Jewish judge is essentially random. The finding reveal robust evidence for...
Measurement Methodologies for Legal Empowerment of the Poor
Article / Working Paper, GAP, Justice, Academic/Think Tank, UNDP ProducedThis paper draws on existing methodologies and theoretical frameworks and argues that a narrowly defined, subject-centric approach to measurement of legal empowerment is key to the monitoring of progress towards legally empowering the poor. It argues that broad macroeconomic indicators and topdown assessments are fundamentally incapable of examining important aspects. In the summer of 2008...