Measuring Government Effectiveness and its Consequences for ...

Measuring Government Effectiveness and Its Consequences for Social Welfare Audrey Sacks, Department of Sociology, University of Washington
sacks@u.washington.edu Margaret Levi, Department of Political Science, University of Washington
mlevi@u.washington.edu April 2007
Abstract Social scientists are still grappling with how to assess the extent to
which a government is effective. In this paper, we introduce a new way of
thinking about effective government and a tool to measure effective
government at the individual level. If a government is effective, it should
be able to deliver goods that individuals need in order to improve their
social welfare. At the minimum, an effective government provides an
environment, where all citizens enjoy reliable access to sufficient amounts
of food. Using mixed-effects regression, we analyze individual-level data
from sixteen sub-Saharan countries sampled in 2005 by Afrobarometer. We
find that those citizens who enjoy high levels of food security are those
who live in neighborhoods with electricity grids, roads and little crime,
and those more likely to have access to primary school, identity cards, and
household services from governments. Our results suggest that by improving
the quality and quantity of certain institutions that we demonstrate are
casually linked to food security at the individual and household level,
governments can improve their effectiveness.
Introduction
As we can see from the current turmoil in Iraq, it is not the mere
presence of a governing body but instead the effectiveness of government
that affects social order. An effective government is one that is capable
of protecting the population from violence, ensuring security of property
rights, and providing the infrastructure that makes possible the exchange
of goods and delivery of services. The more government is effective in
this sense, the higher the level of social welfare, as observable in
whether households enjoy food security, ceteris paribus. The quantity and
the quality of infrastructure development, administrative capacity, and law
and order, we argue, affect citizens' social welfare. The ability to
assess government performance and its effect on individuals and their
households can facilitate the capacity of governments and aid agencies to
identify how best to allocate resources to improve citizens' food security,
health and general well-being. In this paper, we introduce a way to
measure effective government and its consequences at the household level.
Our results are intuitive but strongly grounded in the empirical evidence:
by improving the quality and quantity of certain institutions, governments
can enhance the social welfare of its citizens. Measuring Effective Government
Using a large sample of countries, researchers find a significant
correlation between the reliability and quality of states, economic growth,
and social development (Kaufmann, Kraay and Zoido-Lobaton 1999; Kaufmann,
Kraay and Zoido-Lobaton 2002; Knack and Keefer 1995). These studies derive
indicators of rule of law, the probability of expropriation, and
infrastructural quality from surveys of country experts. The resulting
research significantly advances the capacity to measure and assess the
quality and role of government institutions. However, it cannot reveal
which institutions matter for individual well-being.
Studies using aggregate indicators to identify the effect of
government on social welfare are limited for three reasons. First, they do
not help us to identify the actual government institutions that matter for
individuals' well-being. Second, using aggregate indicators, especially
per capita income growth, may disguise income inequality within countries.
Those suffering deprivation may be excluded from any increase in per capita
national income. Third, an increase in national income does not
necessarily correspond to improvements in relevant government institutions
or to improvements in citizens' food security, the variable we are using as
a key indicator of whether what appears to be an effective government is
actually effective. Even with an increase in income among those at-risk,
improvements in their health and nutritional status may not take place
without accompanying information about how best to use additional
resources. Nor does an increase in national income necessarily correspond
to an improvement in the accessibility or quality of services for the most
vulnerable (Smith and Haddad 2002, 55).
In this paper, we introduce and test an alternative model for
measuring government effectiveness. Our work complements existing models
that rely on aggregate indicators of governance, but our model promises to
do what macro-models cannot: identify micro-level variables. Specifically,
we rely on individual-level measures in order to assess the impact of
country-level effects on citizens' social welfare. Macro-level models
have difficulty accounting for why differences in national wealth translate
into differences in levels of social welfare; we need more micro-level data
for that. We were lucky enough to find a source in the Afrobarometer
surveys. This data is drawn from Africa, the continent with the most
widespread malnutrition and most widespread instances of famines. Of the 21
famines that occurred world-wide since 1970, all but two - Bangladesh in
1974 and North Korea in the late 1990s - ocurred in sub-Saharan Africa (von
Braun, Teklu and Webb 1999, 3). Although our empirical modeling is limited
to only sixteen countries on one continent, analysis of Afrobarometer data
permits us to find out if, as we suspect, the level of infrastructure
development, and the quality of the bureaucracy and law enforcement
capacity explain a significant amount of variation in individuals' food
security.
Food security constitutes a necessary but insufficient condition for
an individual's attainment of an adequate level of social welfare. This
study's dependent variable is whether an individual and his or her
household members enjoyed high levels of food security within the year
preceding the survey.[i] We define high levels of food security as a
condition in which all household members always have enough food to eat.
From the work of Sen (1981) and his successors (de Waal 1989; Devereux
2001; Edkins 1996; Keen 1994; Rangasami 1985), we know that food insecurity
or famines can occur irrespective of the aggregate availability of food or
even its aggregate consumption. Food insecurity is often a result of weak
institutions, or state failure to take measures to protect citizens' legal
or extralegal exchange of entitlements in the face of conflict, war,
drought, or floods, (Sen 1981). An overview found that twenty-one of the
thirty-two major twentieth century famines were primarily caused by poor
policies on the part of local and national government levels and
international aid agencies (Devereux 2000, 6). Many other famines that
were triggered by droughts or floods were aggravated by governments
policies and poor information on the part of international aid agencies
(Devereux 2001, 256).[ii]
Recent examples from Zimbabwe and Malawi are cases in point. At the
end of 2002 an estimated 90 percent of the 300,000 Zimbabweans who were
given land by the government under the current land reform program still
lacked farm inputs and an estimated 94 percent did not have seeds for the
upcoming season. Meanwhile, farmers confront difficulties in accessing
credit at banks because of uncertainty over whether they or the government
owns the land. By the end of 2002, Zimbabwe's average farming output was
down by about 75 percent from the previous year (Clover 2003, 11).
Likewise, financial mismanagement both on the part of the Malawian
government and the IMF in the sale of the country's strategic grain reserve
played a crucial role in triggering the worst famine Malawi has experienced
since 1949 (Clover 2003, 11).
Foreign governments, multilateral institutions, and NGOs continue to
pay for a substantial proportion of public goods in developing countries,
where aid comprises around 50 percent of state incomes. Whether or not
food comes from public or private sources is irrelevant; infrastructure
development, a reliable bureaucracy, and competent law enforcement are all
essential for the adequate provision of food. Where there are poor roads,
for example, the transportation of grain is costly and slow, which can
cause onerous difficulties for governments and aid agencies delivering food
aid during droughts or conflicts. Where there are corrupt, poor or even
non-existent bureaucracies, farmers are not able to access the requisite
loans to purchase farming equipment. Likewise, without dependable
bureaucracies, governments or external aid agencies may not be able to
properly identify who is need of aid.
The ability of governments to help citizens maintain a steady food
supply is even more essential today in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis
sweeping throughout Southern Africa As a result of the epidemic, an
increasing number of households are experiencing shortages of food due to a
loss of assets and skills associated with adult mortality, the burden of
caring for sick household members and orphans, and general changes in
dependency patterns (de Waal 2003, 10). Data and Methods
This project relies on the third round of Afrobarometer data that
surveys Africans' views towards democracy, economics, and civil society
with random, stratified, nationally representative samples. In 2005,
trained enumerators conducted face to face interviews in local languages
with 23,151 respondents across 16 countries (see table 1).[iii] The margin
of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points at a 95 percent level of
confidence where the country sam