Policy undertakings by the seven “summit” countries: ascertaining the degree of compliance a comment

Abstract

Credibility (or lack of it) ’ m 01 ernment g . policy announcements is important. Hence, the task the authors have set for themselves in this paper-to analyze the content, of the policy undertakings issued by 15 annual economic summit meetings of the seven major economic powers, and measure the extent to which they have been honored-is a lauda,ble one. It is also a difficult one, because summit statements are oft,en made purposely vague, in order to avoid the embarrassment that would occur if a clear and unambiguous commitment were not honored. (Remember the so-called forecaster’s rule: “When forecasting, give t,hem a. number, or give them a date, but never both.“) The authors’ method has three steps. For ea.ch statement of a policy undertaking, (1) decide whether it implies a commitment or not (in 203 cases in 15 yea.rs they decided it) did); (2) If so, wait a year to see what happened; and then (3) g’ lve a score between -1 and +l to indicate the degree of compliance. The unweighted a.verage of the scores given for all commitments was a.bout 0.131 (it was a.bout 0.27 if each country’s scores were weighted by its GNP: thus, the bigger countries were scored as slightly less compliant). The scoring was done a.s follows. For each commitment, two benchmark points on the scale were set, by arbitra.rily assigning a score of zero to an outcome that was judged to represent no movement toward compliance, and a score of +1 to an outcome t,hat was judged to represent ideal compliance. (The way “ideal compliance” is defined is crucial to the results, as will be