Buchbesprechungen

Abstract

The Developing Countries Prize is a biannual award given by the Justus Liebig University in Giessen and the KfW Development Bank in Frankfurt am Main. In 2006 the prize was awarded to outstanding researches in the field of Good Governance. The major laureates, Stephen Knack and Philipp Keefer from the World Bank, as well as the laureates of the prize for junior scientists, received their awards at a symposium held on November 16-17, 2006. This book includes the papers presented at the symposium. The Governance concept is still the subject of controversial discussions. Scholars have just recently analyzed the topic in depth, when some international agencies started to pay more attention to this issue and linked it with democracy promotion in developing countries during the 1990's. In the course of this task scholars and policy makers have realized how broad and complex the implementation of the Good Governance concept may be. In this regard, the book illustrates the complexity of the subject, presenting the multiple and still endless discussion around democracy promotion and governance and the role of international agencies supporting development. The discussion is enriched by different perspectives and theoretical approaches. From the academia to actual political practice and from the domestic policy level to the international one, this book puts together the state of the art of the Governance discussion in a very easy way to read. Steven Knack , lead economist of the World Bank, shows how cross-country analyses confirm, that governance indicators measuring corruption, bureaucratic quality and rule of law among others are strongly associated with growth rates and even with investment rates. Likewise, some other indicators from the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG), the Business Environment Risk Intelligence (BERI) and Freedom House are also applied to run statistical analysis in order to determine how governance and institutional quality may be related with economic growth and development. Certainly, in general terms, most of the researches confirm the strong relation between both realms. However, the direction of causality is still in the centre of the discussion, because scholars have not reached a consensus whether democracy and Good Governance produce better economic performance or if it is the other way around. In a very refreshing view of how to fight corruption, Johann Graf Lambsdorff" s contribution made me remember Bentham' s argumentation about the Panopticon or "ideal prison", a tenet also used by Foucault to illustrate the lateral surveillance or self-policing.