London: Workshop on Measuring Poor State Performance

Assessing governance in fragile States is a particularly intricate issue that has recently been the focus of experts' attention. This workshop on Measuring Poor State Performance was organized by the Crisis States Research Centre (CSRC), London School of Economics on 20 and 21 May 2010.

 

An integral part of the Crisis States Research Centre (CSRC) agenda, the quantitative research on fragility measurements presented at the workshop has been carried out by a multidisciplinary team (statisticians, mathematicians, political scientists) led by Francisco Gutiérrez Sanin, from the National University of  Colombia.

 

Over two days participants - producers of fragility indices, researchers and donors - were walked through existing databases and fragility indices and their shortcomings (e.g. shortage and reliability of data, aggregation methods, ambiguous definitions), as well as alternative methods to partially improve the quality of indices (fuzzy regression, alternative aggregation methods). The research team also introduced their operationalization of the concept of fragility, the MAT database developed by them and the results of applying the methodology on two projects. The research findings were strongly supported by a remarkable analytical work employing sophisticated methods and computations.

 

For more information on fragility indices, see UNDP – DIE, Users’ Guide on Measuring Fragility, 2009.