Why we should Provide Legal Identities for All by 2030
Corruption last year cost the world more than one trillion dollars. That is a trillion dollars we can’t use to get better health care, education, food and environment. And corruption is only part of the problem of poor governance – many countries are run ineffectively, lacking accountability, transparency and rule of law.
Running countries better would have obvious benefits. It would not only reduce corruption but governments would provide more services the public wants and at better quality. It is also likely that economic growth would increase. In a recent UN survey of seven million people around the world, an honest and responsive government was fourth in the list of people’s priorities, with only education and healthcare and better jobs being rated higher. Survey participants from East Africa placed it sixth, before access to clean water and freedom from discrimination.
But how should we get better governance? Mary E. Hilderbrand of the Center for International Development at Harvard has written the main paper on improving governance for the Copenhagen Consensus. As she points out, it is obvious that well-governed nations are better than ill-governed ones. But there are two problems.
The first problem revolves around whether good governance is a prerequisite for development or a consequence of it. Historical analyses have shown that good institutions like security of property rights is the single most important factor behind the variation in wealth of countries, and that more corruption goes together with less economic growth. That seems to suggest that better secured property rights and less corruption will generate more wealth. However, further analyses have shown that it could just as easily be that higher wealth and economic growth lead to better governance. For now, it is hard to say that good governance is the main way to start a virtuous circle.
The second problem is that we don’t know much about how to get good governance. A study of 80 countries where the World Bank had programs to improve governance showed that governance improved in 39% of countries but worsened in 25% – what could look like a moderate success. However, all the countries the World Bank didn’t help had similar success and failure rates – suggesting that the World Bank programs had made no difference.
The simple point is that while everyone can agree it would be great to get rid of corruption and have more transparent and accountable government, we often know very little about how to achieve it. That is why proposed targets like “Substantially reduce corruption and bribery in all its forms” sound great, but are essentially well-meaning slogans with little content.
Indeed, Hilderbrand finds that many proposed targets are too generalized and some even a poor use of resources.
However, she does find one target that would do a lot of good for each dollar spent. “By 2030 provide legal identity for all, including birth registration.” This may sound like a very unambitious step to those of us lucky enough to live in prosperous democracies where such things are taken for granted, but it would be a major step for many developing countries.
Importantly, this is a measurable outcome, so progress can be monitored. It also means that there must be functioning public services to provide registration facilities and maintain records. Building this capacity in a single well-defined area would provide a clear model for how other services can be provided effectively. It is also unlikely in any case that a registration service would exist in a vacuum; an effective one would almost certainly be a sign of an emerging public service competence.
There are also real benefits to each citizen of having a proper legal identity. It helps them to claim their legal rights, for example, and would certainly also help to establish property rights, which are vital to allow individuals to prosper and the economy to grow. Elections become less vulnerable to corruption when voters are properly registered. And, as an economy grows, a proper legal identity is essential for opening a bank account or getting a drivers licence.
You can read all of the papers on governance targets for the post-2015 development agenda here. In them, Mary Hilderbrand, Senior Lectuer at Texas A&M University writes the main report, peer-reviewed in perspective papers by Aart Kraay, Economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank Matt Andrews, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School . Additionally, NGOs and stakeholders such as Seton Hall University and Epic Foundation present viewpoint papers concerning Hilderbrand's analysis.
