TIRANA, July 20 – A World Bank research shows that governance in Albania and other Central and Eastern European countries has already improved.
The World Bank’s latest Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) allow comparison of how governance has developed in different parts of the world over the past 10 years. In the case of the Central-Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, this can shed light on which aspects of political transition have progressed most.
Albania is mentioned as the country that has made major progress in the control of corruption, rule of law and political stability.
The WGI provides aggregate measures of governance according to six different dimensions, namely:
–voice and accountability (freedom of expression, association and the media, and citizens’ ability to participate in the political system);
–political stability and absence of violence (including the threat of terrorism);
–government effectiveness (perceptions of quality and independence of public services, policy formation);
–regulatory quality (in particular, promoting the private sector);
–rule of law (quality of law enforcement, prevalence of crime and violence), and;
–control of corruption (perceptions that public power is exercised for private gain, and ‘state capture’).
Serbian success
The World Bank highlights those countries that have shown the most significant improvements on the dimensions of governance from 1998-2008.
Within CEE, the most improved are Serbia, which has made the largest gains of any CEE country on five of the six dimensions (all except regulatory quality).
Besides these, Croatia has improved greatly on voice and accountability, Latvia on rule of law, Slovakia on regulatory quality and Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) on government effectiveness.
However, many of these countries had a low starting point. Moreover, this measure of overall improvement makes it difficult to gauge whether the change reflects consistent reform or a one-off major change, as is often associated with regime change. For example, at the beginning of the measured period, Serbia and Croatia were both still governed by wartime authoritarian leaders
E.U. effect?
Governance issues are among the areas where the E.U. has sought to influence CEE countries as part of the accession process, with particular attention being paid to fighting corruption, establishing the rule of law and improving voice and accountability. Thus, the WGI might potentially be used to gain insights into the effectiveness of this effort.
In general, it seems that improvements on the control of corruption and rule of law dimensions appear harder to achieve and somewhat less durable than improvements in political stability and voice and accountability.
The research was made by Oxford Analytica, an independent strategic-consulting firm drawing on a network of more than 1,000 expert scholars at Oxford and other leading universities and research institutions around the world.
