lant pritchett november 2010

Graphs of “Capability Traps”for the ICRG based “Quality of

Government” for each country of bottom 43 plus countries overall

Lant PritchettNovember 2010

Description of data

• Based on ICRG data, three variables to form a “quality of Government” variable

Description of Graphs• The data are for the most recent year of the indicator from the

previous sources (each green dot is a country observation, the chosen country is labeled at its observation and four countries are highlighted: Somalia, Singapore, India and Costa Rica.

• There are horizontal lines at each indicator going backward for Somalia (the minimum) and forward from Singapore (the maximum) and across the graph at the overall cross-national median and a vertical line at 2033 (25 years from the data).

• The “maximum historical trend” is the linear extrapolation back from the current level to Somalia’s level of the indicator (the minimum possible) at the country’s date of independence.

• In addition there are various scenarios illustrated, depending on the available data.

Four Scenarios• “Maximum historical trend” which is the “Value of

Somalia at independence to observed value today” growth rate extrapolated into the future

• The “fastest 20” extrapolates the growth rate of the fastest 20 countries in the data—which are also just based on assumptions, not really actual time series (and so overestimates growth rates for those recently independent countries)

• Country’s own actual average• Average of all countries