A public access codebook for the international development research community
Arno TAUSCH
Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Innsbruck University, Austria
E-mail: Arno.Tausch@uibk.ac.at
Box 1: The independent variables
% women in government, all levels is one of the UNDP’s long-term lead indicators of the institutionalization of political feminism. We time-lagged the variable and measured the it by around 1998. It was documented in the NDP HDR 2000. The idea of the indicator is to capture the real advance of women not only at the level of the top political administration of a given country, but at the general level of the central government, i.e. taking the important decision-making ministerial bureaucracies into account as well.
% of world population was calculated from UNDP HDR 2007/2008 statistics, and reflects the enormous differences in size of the nations of the earth, and the demographic weight of a nation in world society. The 10 most populous nations currently are China, India, United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russian Federation, Nigeria, and Japan. Together, these countries already account for some 61% of humanity, and in between them, China and India already account for more than 38% of humanity.
The 2000 Economic Freedom Score is the key international indicator for economic liberalism and was published, among others, by the Heritage Foundation, the CATO Institute and other leading global liberal think-tanks. The basic assumption of the indicator is that economic freedom is the fundamental right of every human to control his or her own labor and property. In an economically free society, the assumption is, that individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, with that freedom both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state. In economically free societies, the indicator assumption is that governments allow labor, capital and goods to move freely, and refrain from coercion or constraint of liberty beyond the extent necessary to protect and maintain liberty itself. The index measures ten components of economic freedom, assigning a grade in each using a scale from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the maximum freedom. The ten component scores are then averaged to give an overall economic freedom score for each country. The ten components of economic freedom are: Business Freedom, Trade Freedom, Fiscal Freedom, Government Spending, Monetary Freedom, Investment Freedom, Financial Freedom, Property rights, Freedom from Corruption, and Labor Freedom. We time-lagged the index somewhat to allow the study of the more long-term effects. In 2000, the 10 freeest economies of the world were Hong Kong, China (SAR), Singapore, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Australia, Switzerland, Luxembourg, United States, El Salvador, and Ireland. The 10 most restrictive and anti-liberal economic regimes were to be observed in Angola, Cuba, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Guinea-Bissau, Congo (Democratic Republic of the), Iran (Islamic Republic of), Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Syrian Arab Republic, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
Absolute latitude is the indicator of the absolute geographical position of a country, away from the equator, used, among others, by Professor William Easterly from New York University (Easterly, 2000). The simple question, connected with this indicator, is whether or not being in the tropics is bad for development. The theoretical concepts related to the inclusion of this indicator can be manifold, featuring the long-term effects of malaria etc. The 10 most distant nations from the Equator were: Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, the Russian Federation, Lithuania, and Ireland. Most social scientists would contend that institutions, and not latitude matters most decisively for development performance.
Annual population growth rate, 1975-2005 in (%) measures long-term population growth since the mid-1970s (data of the UNDP Human Development Report Office Statistics portal). The highest population growth in the period was to be observed in United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Jordan, Oman, and Niger. The most deficient demographic growth rates or even shrinking populations) were observed in: Bulgaria, Georgia, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Hungary, Belarus, Romania, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic.
The next indicator are the time-lagged comparative price levels (US=1.00) and they were calculated from the UNDP Human Development Report 2000. The GDP at current international exchange rate is simply divided by the GDP at real purchasing power parity for each country of the world. The USA are the international standard, with the US achieving the value of 1.0. We already mentioned that European policy-making calls the indicator ‘comparative price levels’ but dependency theories calls its reciprocal value ‘equal exchange/unequal exchange/unequal transfer’ (Kohler/Tausch, 2003, furthermore Raffer, 1987, Yotopoulos, 1996, and Yotopoulos/Sawada, 2005). Among economists also the term ‘exchange rate deviation index’ to deisgnate the phenomenon is common. In objective terms, it measures the degree, to which globalization has contributed to lowering the international price level of a country; i.e. it is an indicator about the openness of the price system vis-à-vis the pressures of dependent insertion into the global economy. The 10 countries with the highest comparative price level, and thus most immune from the downward global pressures on the price system were Qatar, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Ireland, Sweden, Kuwait, and the Netherlands. The lowest international comparative price levels with the highest rates of ‘unequal exchange’ were to be observed in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Guinea, Burundi, Gambia, Cambodia, Congo (Democratic Republic of the), Nepal, Ghana, and Rwanda.
The next indicator is the time-lagged foreign savings rate, and it was calculated from the UNDP Human Development Report 2000 for the year 1998. We time-lagged the indicator to evaluate the more long-term effects of the variable. For dependency authors, especially Paul Israel Singer, foreign savings show the weight that foreign savings, mostly from the centers and richer semi-peripheries, have in the accumulation process of the host countries in the periphery and semi-periphery. It is calculated by the difference between the share of investments per GDP and the share of savings per GDP.
As we already stated, FPZ (free production zones) employment as % of total population is the indicator, best suited to measure what the effects of the ‘NIDL’ (new international division of labour). This important sub-school of dependency and world systems research, most prominently stated in Froebel/Heinrichs and Kreye (1980) predicted the unfettered rise of the model of ‘export processing zones’, especially in China and Southeast Asia. More recent studies were Ross, 2004 and Singa-Boyenge, 2007. They highlighted the fact that these Export Processing Zones (EPZ) – or ‘Free Production Zones’ already account for some 80 percent of the merchandise exports of countries like China, Kenya, the Philippines, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Senegal, Tunisia, Vietnam. 3500 EPZs in 130 countries of the world now employ 66 Million people, among these 40 million employees in China. The tendency, correctly foreseen by Froebel/Heinrichs/Kreye, 1980 towards this total global re-location of world industries continues unabated. While a large number of countries (currently 98) still do not practice this model, the highest values are found in Bahrain, Maldives, Fiji, Belize, United Arab Emirates, Lithuania, Malta, Nicaragua, Mauritius, Hong Kong, China (SAR).
The natural logarithm of GDP per capita and its square was calculated from the UNDP Human Development Report 2000 for the year 1998. The double logarithmic formulation is a classic in transnational comparative development research, and captures best the theoretical concepts of progressing development, described by the ‘Kuznets curve’ of rising and then falling inequality, the ‘Matthews effect’ of rapid economic growth at middle income levels, the ‘environmental Kuznets curve’ etc. We tested the double logarithmical formulation for all 41 main equations of this book.
Membership in the Islamic Conference is a very clear and simple measurement concept for the Huntingtonian hypothesis that – inter alia – Islam will be a devlopment blockade in the 21st Century. Our indicator is simply a dummy-variable (1 for membership, 0 for non-membership), based on the Website of the Organization of Islamic Conference (download 2009).
Military expenditures per GDP were taken from the UNDP Human Development Report Office Statistics facility, HDR 2007-2008, and were time-lagged to take into account the very-long-term effects of military spending rates. The time point chosen was the beginning of the 1990s. Then, the 10 countries with the highest military expenditures were: Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Russian Federation, Israel, Ethiopia, Yemen, Croatia, Lebanon, and Jordan. The lowest miltary expenditures were observed in Costa Rica, Iceland (both have no military forces of their own), Peru, Mauritius, Tajikistan, Mexico, Ghana, Estonia, Dominican Republic, and Jamaica.
As usual in cross-national development research over the last decades, the military personnel rate measures a country’s army personnel per 1000 population, and due to the skewness of the indicator, there is a strong and well-founded research tradition, founded by the eminent German sociologist Erich Weede, to calculate the natural logarithm of the original number plus the number 1 (ln (MPR+1)). The statistical source of our data was the official website of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. The data refer to the first decade of the new Millenium. The comparatively largest armies in the world were to be encountered in Eritrea, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Oman, Syrian Arab Republic, Bahrain, and Qatar.
Volker Bornschier and his sociological tradition dveloped a high theoretical and empirical awareness about the detrimental long-term consequences of the absence of ‘MNC headquarter status’ (MNC HEADQU), measured in our analysis by the time-lagged indicator MNC outward investments (stock) per GDP by around 1995. It is thus an indicator of the power or weakness of the ‘national’ capital in question on the world markets. Bornschier and his school expected that a high headquarter status very well mitigates against the long-term negative effects of MNC penetration (the value of the stock of cumulated foreign direct investment per GDP of the host country). The highest MNC headquarter status today was observed in Panama, Hong Kong, China (SAR), Switzerland, Singapore, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Ireland, while the 10 countries with the lowest value were Togo, Iran (Islamic Republic of), Kazakhstan, Angola, Lesotho, Nicaragua, Lithuania, Haiti, Qatar, and Burundi. The indicator was taken from UNCTAD sources.
MNC penetration (MNC PEN) is the key variable of most quantitative dependency and world systems theories, and it measures the weight that cumulated foreign capital investments had in the host countries, i.e. the percentages of the cumulated stocks of multinational corporation investments per total host country GDP. We time-lagged our indicator and used the values for the year 1995, to take the long-term societal consequences of foreign direct investment penetration into account. Bornschier and his school predicted a strong long-term negative determination of development by a high MNC penetration, due to the negative consequences, monopolies have on the long term development trajectory of countries. The 10 countries with the highest MNC penetration rate in 1995 were: Hong Kong, China (SAR), Saint Kitts and Nevis, Equatorial Guinea, Vanuatu, Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Singapore, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago. The 10 least MNC-penetrated countries in the world were: Dominican Republic, Cyprus, Sao Tome and Principe, Cuba, Nepal, Kuwait, Belarus, Japan, Uzbekistan, and Bhutan.
We also measured the growth of MNC penetration over time (DYN MNC PEN), from 1995 to 2005, again based on UNCTAD sources. The Bornschier school expected short-term dynamic effects from such MNC penetration increases. The biggest absolute % increases were to be observed in Hong Kong, China (SAR), Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Belgium, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore, Jordan, Luxembourg, and Bahamas, while the biggest decreases were to be found in Yemen, Angola, Syrian Arab Republic, Botswana, Niger, Gabon, Swaziland, Namibia, Oman, and Nigeria.
The Openness-Index was also time-lagged for the year 1990, and it measures the very long-term 2-decade effects of export-shares per GDP + import-shares per GDP. It was taken from the UNDP Human Development Report Office statistics facility, HDR 2007/2008. The countries with the greatest openness in 1990 were the small states and territories Hong Kong, China (SAR), Bahrain, Luxembourg, Malta, Antigua and Barbuda, Slovenia, Panama, Croatia, Swaziland, and Saint Lucia.
Population density was taken from US CIA World Factbook. It measures population density per square kilometer by around the first decade in the new Millenium.
Public education expenditure per GDP for the middle of the first decade of the new millenium was taken from the UNDP’s Human Development Report Office statistics facility on the internet (UNDP HDR 2000), and refers to the time-lagged data for 1995-1997 to measure the long-term effects of public education expenditures.
Likewise, we used the UNDP’s education index, which is a compound measure of performance of the education system on the primary, secondary and tertiary level, measured for the middle of the new decade of the millenium, and taken from the UNDP HDR 2007/2008. It is comprised of adult literacy rates and the combined gross enrolment ratio for primary, secondary and tertiary schooling, weighted to give adult literacy more significance in the statistic.
Download the full paper (PDF): Data Code Book
Download the Excel File: 41 indicators
[1] Opinions expressed by Dr. Tausch in this contribution are exclusively those expressed in his capacity as adjunct professor at Austrian Universities and do not or do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Austrian government. Original language: English. All correspondence on the book should be directed to arno.tausch@uibk.ac.at
