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nor rule out alterations in rank order given the complete absence of citizen surveys for most of their indicators, but we are not convinced that they are necessary to introduce bias into RL – which is, after all, an interval measure. Furthermore, the Afrobarometer data reported in Kurtz and Schrank (2007b: 566, Table 1) suggest that businesspeople themselves offer inconsistent evidence on the quality of governance. While they actually report better access to public services than their compatriots, they nonetheless hold the government in lower esteem. Kaufmann et al. (2007a: 555) go on to note that ‘this concept is much more closely related to our measures of Rule of Law and Control of Corruption, as well as several other indicators of these concepts’. Of course, this suggests that a large public sector may be as much a symptom as a cause of human development, at least if ‘cause’ is defined senso stricto.
Chapter 5 Good governance scripts: Will compliance improve form or functionality? 1 2
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Book 1.indb 187
The chapter builds on Andrews (2008). The WGI ‘Regulatory Burden’ element has as one of its core sources scores on the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index for government intervention in the economy, which is measured in terms of the following: government consumption as a percentage of the economy, government ownership of businesses and industries, share of government revenues from state-owned enterprises and government ownership of property, economic output produced by the government. The numbers draw from my own assessment of Question 4, a to k, in the 2007 OECD Budget Practices and Procedures Database, which asks about the legal basis of the following: the form and structure of the annual budget and related legislation, the timing of the annual budget process, roles and responsibilities of different parts of the executive in budget formulation and execution, roles and responsibilities of the legislature and the executive in the budget process, provisions on what happens when the budget is not approved by the beginning of the fiscal year, requirement for legislative authorization of spending, requirement for legislative authorization of taxes, rules for the use of contingency or reserve funds, requirement for audit of government accounts by the supreme audit institution, requirements for internal audit structures in line ministries, management and reporting relating to off-budget expenditures. The entire group of governments was in fiscal trouble in the early to mid-1990s, the tail of a fiscal expansion period that led to some significant adjustments in the past 15 years. Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and Venezuela. Anderson (2006: 2) noted that deficits were re-entering the agenda in 2006, stating that ‘[f]iscal deficits have reclaimed their place as a pressing public policy issue around the world’. See OECD (2002) for more detailed analysis of fiscal rules that confirms the information in the table. One (Australia) has had surpluses in the past few years while the other (United States) has recorded deficits.
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