Bad Governance is the mother of all evils".

1. Introduction

2. Parameters of Governance (World Bank)

(a) The process by which governments are selected, monitored, and replaced:

1. Voice and Accountability (VA) – capturing perceptions of the extent to which a country's citizens are
able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of
association, and a free media.

2. Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism (PV) – capturing perceptions of the likelihood
that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including
politically-motivated violence and terrorism.

(b) The capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies:

3. Government Effectiveness (GE) – capturing perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of
the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy
formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government's commitment to such policies.

4. Regulatory Quality (RQ) – capturing perceptions of the ability of the government to formulate and
implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development.

(c) The respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions
among them:

5. Rule of Law (RL) – capturing perceptions of the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide
by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police,
and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence.

6. Control of Corruption (CC) – capturing perceptions of the extent to which public power is exercised
for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as "capture" of the state by
elites and private interests.

We believe that this definition provides a useful way of thinking about governance issues as well as a
useful way of organizing the available empirical measures of governance as described below. Yet we
recognize that for other purposes, other definitions of governance may of course also be relevant. In this
spirit we make the source data underlying our indicators publicly available at www.govindicators.org,
and encourage users with different objectives to combine the data in different ways more suited to their
needs. In the next section of the paper we describe how we use our definitions to organize a large
number of empirical proxies into the six categories mentioned above.

We also note that these six dimensions of governance should not be thought of as being somehow
independent of one another. One might reasonably think for example that better accountability
mechanisms lead to less corruption, or that a more effective government can provide a better
regulatory environment, or that respect for the rule of law leads to fairer processes for selecting and
replacing governments and less abuse of public office for private gain. In light of such inter-relationships,
it is not very surprising that our six composite measures of governance are strongly positively correlated
across countries. These inter-relationships also mean that the task of assigning individual variables
measuring various aspects of governance to our six broad categories is not clear-cut. While we have
taken considerable care to make these assignments reasonably in our judgment, in some cases there is
also room for debate. For this reason as well, the availability of the underlying source data is a useful
feature of the WGI as it allows users with other objectives, or other conceptions of governance, to
organize the data in ways suited to their needs.

a) Accountability

b) Corruption

c) Rule of law

d) Transparency

e) Justice

3. Bad governance is mother of all evils because:

a) It produces corruption and malpractices

b) It becomes cause of egoism & extremism

c) It shuns the justice and thus the rebellions erupt

d) It disintegrate the national unity

e) It fetches social crimes ranging from theft to murder

f) It makes vendetta between political forces

g) It plants colossal evils to shatter the norms of ethics

4. Roadmap to shun the bad governance

5. Conclusion

U.N. Says Bad Government Is Often the Cause of Poverty

By BARBARA CROSSETTEAPRIL 5, 2000

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After years of treading carefully around the issue of why so many countries stay poor or become poorer,
the United Nations put a lot of the blame in a report today on bad government, a message many leaders
seeking more aid and debt relief will not want to hear.

The report from the United Nations Development Program, the world's largest aid agency, calls for
rethinking traditional ideas about battling poverty in the third world. It reflects the debates in many
nations, including the United States, about why poverty persists even in regions of substantial economic
growth and political freedom.

The report makes ''good governance'' the top priority in poverty-fighting by the development program
under a new administrator, Mark Malloch Brown, whose organization supports a range of governance
projects. Without good governance, reliance on trickle-down economic development and a host of other
strategies will not work, the report concludes.

Mr. Malloch Brown, a Briton who came to the United Nations last year from the World Bank, has drawn
hostility from developing countries. They accuse him of interfering in the internal affairs of
governments, a criticism also leveled at Secretary General Kofi Annan for suggesting that nations with
human rights abuses can no longer hide behind their borders, claiming national sovereignty.

''This report is particularly important for me in terms of skewering a particularly odd U.N. debate which
flourishes in this curious greenhouse at the East River,'' Mr. Malloch Brown said at a news conference
today, ''which is that somehow the U.N.D.P. was getting out of poverty and into governance work. What
this report clearly demonstrates is that governance is a critical building block for poverty reduction.''
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Embracing democracy is often not enough, and certainly not a panacea, the report found.

''Having regular elections -- free and fair -- contributes to accountability, especially if they are also held
at the local level,'' the report says. ''But such democratic forms are no vaccination against poverty.''

Development experts now accept the idea that local governments, often neglected or nonexistent in the
developing world, must play a crucial role in poverty reduction. Historically, foreign aid has gone to
central governments. When donors could no longer ignore how much aid was being siphoned off in
corruption or misuse of funds, nongovernmental agencies, not local governments, were given the
money or goods.

A growing number of development experts now believe that this shift bred its own problems as the
private agencies invented projects to get more money or funneled aid in line with their own priorities,
making national efforts disjointed.

Big, expensive surveys of poverty are not much good either, the report says. It recommends frequent
and rapid monitoring studies to assess programs and policies.

The United Nations Development Program's report is being published as the General Assembly prepares
to review progress since the 1995 international conference on social development in Copenhagen. At
that conference, nations made three commitments: to estimate the incidence of poverty within their
borders, to set targets for reducing or eliminating poverty and to introduce anti-poverty plans.

Surveying 140 of the United Nations' 188 members, the report found that 77 percent of countries had
estimated their incidence of poverty -- including extreme poverty, measured by the inability to buy
enough food for daily needs -- but that only 40 percent had incorporated anti-poverty measures into
national planning and 29 percent had dedicated anti-poverty projects.

Countries with the most active and focused measures against poverty were found in the Caribbean,
Latin America and Africa, with Asia and the Pacific falling behind sub-Saharan Africa. The survey
highlights some of the successful projects found around the world.

The new report from the United Nations Development Program -- ''Overcoming Human Poverty: UNDP
Poverty Report 2000'' -- builds in some ways on the agency's pioneering annual human development
reports, a creation of the Mahbub ul Haq, a late Pakistani expert who shifted criteria for measuring
development away from per capita income figures to aspects of human life that play a role in social and
economic growth.

Three factors used by the human development surveys -- adult illiteracy, the proportion of children
under 5 who are underweight and the probability of dying before 40 -- are also assessed in the new
report. It shows most regions lagging on all three fronts, and sometimes moving backward, even as
democracy spreads and economic growth rates rise.