Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics

5 Other Statistical Dimensions

227 5 Other Statistical Dimensions • Classifications and Conventions • Statistics on Governance under Global Influence • Measuring the Role of Government • The City Groups:Turning Over the Stones • Global Indicators: The Missing Calculus • Human Rights, Security, and Individual Welfare • Technical Cooperation There are as many unanswered questions as there are unquestioned answers related to the coverage of data activities by the UN system and UNSO in particular. The reason for this is part conceptual, part political, and part budgetary. This chapter is mostly about what ground has not been tilled by UNSO and proposes some topics for its pending agenda. Box 5.1. A Classification That Changed the Understanding of the World In 1815, William Smith, a self-taught blacksmith’s son from Oxfordshire who became a canal engineer, single-handedly and without any financial support or professional direction completed the first geological map of England and Wales. Smith identified, classified, and named all the various layers of rock he discovered as he dug canals and journeyed the length and breadth of the country. He then transferred his findings to a huge eight-by-six–foot hand-painted map that he spent almost twenty years painstakingly preparing. His work of carefully delineating, locating, and classifying rocks transformed the way people understood the world around them. The map represented a critical step in the development of geology as a modern science. This remarkable achievement paved the way for the exploration and discovery and subsequent exploitation of various precious metals and many other subsoil resources, including oil, and changed the face of the world. Source: Simon Winchester, The MapThat Changed theWorld:TheTale ofWilliam Smith and the Birth of a Science (London: Viking, 2001). 228 Quantifying the World The early work of the UN statistical system has had a lasting impact on how analysts perceive the world. Much of this work has been to good effect, but some has been undesirable.It led indirectly to the acceptance of economic philosophies and the adoption of policies that over the past half-century have failed to alleviate human suffering from material deprivation in the poor parts of the world.Initially, the ideas and corresponding statistical frameworks that were advanced strengthened the role of government and encouraged central oversight and direction.They focused particularly on output,investment,and the creation of jobs, which reflected an interest in economic growth and an unqualified belief in the universal efficacy of Keynesian policy.While this may have been relevant to the relatively diversified and economically advanced countries of Europe and the U.S., it gave rise to problems of interpretation and conflicts of policy interest in the poorer developing countries of the world. In these nations, the disparities between those engaged in the formal economic system and those outside that system are more marked and are only marginally narrowed by redistributive tax transfers. At a time when most industrial countries were beginning slowly to dismantle the excessive involvement of the state in all aspects of socioeconomic policymaking, government involvement was increasing in countries with inefficient bureaucracies and weaker institutions. This has had disastrous longer-term consequences for democracy and effective governance. Several observers have argued strongly that actions by the West to support such regimes underpinned the existing pattern of control and concentration of power and suppressed alternative solutions.1 The transfer of resources to countries facing food shortages and other emergencies in combination with external collateral finance for “convenience haven” right of use2 for logistical and strategic purposes may have, in some instances, obstructed the proper maturation of democracy. Such external support has tended to reinforce existing regimes and protect certain governments from their own domestic policy mistakes.In some situations,generous but ill-conceived food-supply programs may have also undermined the determined efforts of local farmers and entrepreneurs while bolstering existing electoral advantage. The very provision of aid has helped mitigate domestic policy mistakes and strengthened the positions of local politicians in place. The concentration on growth (and to a lesser extent on promoting structural change) has been viewed as being synonymous with development, irrespective of the fact that monetary growth invariably favors those already reasonably well off and has thus aggravated problems of income distribution .3 This has had implications in many emerging countries for the pattern of consumption expenditure,the propensity to import,the low-level of spend- Other Statistical Dimensions 229 ing...