Posted by Michel Lazare
Daniel Kaufmann, a well-known authority on governance and one of the key governance experts at the World Bank, has just launched a personal blog: "The Kaufmann Governance Post.
In his first few posts, he shares his view that governance issues are by and large still misunderstood and indicates his intention to clarify misunderstandings with a series of posts to debunk myths about governance. For instance, the March 3 post is about: Myth #1. Developing countries, and governments in particular, are all rife with corruption, while corruption is virtually absent in much of the rich industrialized world. Worth reading.
Beyond the substance, PFM Blog also notes the modesty and human dimension relfected in the presentation pages of The Kaufmann Governance Post. Long life and full success to this new blog.
Here are a few pieces of information on The Kaufmann Governance Post and on Daniel Kaufmann himself:
We reproduce here his March 1 post, which gives a flavor of what Daniel Kaufmann's wants to achieve with the publication of his blog:
"In spite of progress in this field over the past decade, particularly in terms of research, measurement, and some lessons from experience, governance and corruption remain controversial and often misunderstood topics. There are a number of common misconceptions and popular notions which are now coming under challenge as a result of the analysis of the evidence.
At the risk of oversimplifying, and for the sake of generating debate, I will put forward some of these misunderstood or popularized notions as “myths” on governance and corruption, acknowledging that the reality is often more nuanced. The following blog posts will address some of such common “myths”.
The expectation is not that there will full consensus, of course. A major aim of this blog is in fact to spur debate by bringing points that elicit counterpoints. In fact, in later postings, not necessarily about “myths’, I will be inserting posts bringing a a variety of different and often opposing perspectives on a particular issue, with contributions by others in the field."
Daniel Kaufmann is in particular one of the "fathers" of the World bank-supported Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project which reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 212 countries and territories over the period 1996–2006, for six dimensions of governance:
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See also his Wikipedia page.
