Read this new paper by Andrei Shleifer and his co-authors and tell me that you don't start singing the Elvis song "Return to Sender". Before I tell you about the Shleifer paper, I suggest that you review the lyrics of the King.
I went to Andrei's webpage because he recently released a very good NBER paper on exploring why more educated people complain more about government incompetence. This correlation interests me very much because I believe that environmental regulation will become more effective in LDC nations as the populace becomes more educated because these urbanites will do a better job holding politicians accountable and self interested politicians will be aware that they are now on the "hot seat" and will deliver public goods. Put simply, shirking will decline as monitoring costs fall. The agent will obey the principal!
As I understand it, Andrei's team mailed letters to hundreds of nations to see if the letter was "returned to sender" because the senders intentionally sent to a wrong address. This funky approach creates an objective apples to apples metric of government quality. As the nephew of a postal worker, I find this clever and funny.
To quote the paper; "First, we constructed new objective measures for
the quality of government in 159 countries, those based on return of incorrectly addressed
international mail. These measures correlate with other indicators of the quality of government,
yet have the advantage that we know more precisely what goes into them.
Second, we used these measures to argue that an important reason for poor government in
developing countries is not corruption or patronage, but rather the same basic low productivity
that plagues the private sector in these countries as well. Such low productivity is related to
inputs and technology, but also to management."
Again, this is creative work and the King would approve. His cite count would rise.
