 The work I'm going to talk about today builds on a ongoing project that is funded in part by the Canadian government but is also sought funding from the European Union and a number of other international organizations. The insights drawn some work that we've been doing in part with Rachel Gwisselquist who published a number of important series on failed and fragile states and aid allocation to those countries including a special issue published in Third World Quarterly last year in which we examined state transitions out of fragility and also the sequencing in which countries can undergo successful exit from fragility. So what I'm going to do today is very briefly walk you through some of the current findings from our project. It's a macro level strategic level structural database focusing on countries at risk. We call it the state fragility index. It's the country indicators for foreign policy project which has an affiliated website. Once I've done that and reviewed sort of the current rankings of fragile states in the world according to our assessments, I'm going to walk you through some of the findings regarding those states that we consider to be trapped in fragility and those that have also either successfully exited or are experiencing extreme fluctuations moving in and out of fragility. I'll conclude with a preliminary assessment of some of the causes of the fragility trap and some of the finding findings we've derived from some of our statistical analysis. I apologize in advance if you're unable to make make sense of some of these tables they are quite small for those at the back. I will begin by just simply pointing out our structural database encompasses approximately 190 countries. We use an indexing procedure allows us to compare country performance over time in relation to each each other but also that country itself over time. We use a nine-point scale. It's a global sample so that we are able to assess state fragility on a number of different dimensions encompassing in total about 80 different indicators for about a 35 year period of course. There will be some deficiencies in data for some countries, missing data and so on, some countries that have emerged recently on the scene such as South Sudan for which we don't have complete data. But overall we can get a pretty good picture of how countries are performing over time. We can also drill down a bit and produce what we call composite indices in particular something I want to draw your attention to called the authority legitimacy capacity scores and we can also look at cluster-based analysis about which I'll say a little bit more in a minute. These clusters include not only the authority legitimacy and capacity measures which tap into different dimensions of fragility but also these clusters six clusters of state performance, governance, economic development, security and crime, human development, demography and environment. This is where you would require pretty good glasses if you were to make sense of our rankings here but want to just highlight the the most fragile countries specified here. You can see in orange the high-risk countries that typically score on average above 6.5 and above on our nine-point scale. So anything considered high-risk is that level of performance. The bulk of these countries in 2015 come from sub-Saharan Africa with South Sudan topping the list, Somalia, Central African Republic, Yemen, Sudan and so on down the list. The PowerPoint will be available on the site. You can also access the full and detailed report on our CIFP website which includes a number of different and detailed measures. But what I really wanted to draw your attention to and why we think our project has some value added in the evaluation of state fragility is that we are able to evaluate country performance over time in a number of different ways. So just to highlight that I want to draw your attention to the three years in question 2015, 2014 and 2013. In each instance South Sudan tops our list with Somalia being second most at risk, CAR third most at risk and moving down Yemen Republic changing places with Afghanistan in 2014 and 2013. In many respects what you're seeing here are fragile states that are beset by conflict but one of the advantages of using our framework of authority, legitimacy and capacity is that we're also identifying countries that may not be experiencing extreme conflict and that's precisely why we need a more nuanced and detailed interpretation of state fragility that extends beyond simply conflict equaling fragility or conflict being a cause of state fragility or extreme fragility. In fact what we do is we dissect if you will the overall fragility index into three component parts authority, legitimacy and capacity each of these tapping into different dimensions of statehood. Authority typically specifies how a regime is able to control both its people and its territory. This is kind of the classic Vabarian interpretation of statehood. By and large when we see a government being challenged by a group we see authority weaknesses in that country and those countries that are experiencing conflict typically perform more poorly on the authority scale than others. However the other two I think are important to as a value-added dimensions in understanding fragility namely legitimacy and capacity. Legitimacy is probably the least understood and least well operationalized of the three measures. It's typically an assessment of that state-society relationship in which people respect or accept the governance structures that they are facing. We measure legitimacy in a number of different ways human rights accords, gender equality, environmental protection and so on. Historically we've seen a number of least legitimate countries emanating from the Middle East. At one point Saudi Arabia was the least legitimate country for a number of years and yet this is a country that was working with us in the global war on terror. Capacity most closely is identified with economic development but also service delivery and so on. So there you have it the kind of the tripartite threefold definition of state fragility and this allows us to differentiate ourselves from different kinds of indices that measure fragility. Most indices tap into that conflict dimension or that economic dimension but when you bring in legitimacy into the into the picture you get a different kind of ranking altogether and highlight that. I want to draw your attention to how you can measure countries on these three different dimensions. The authority scores as I mentioned earlier we produce countries that are typically beset by large-scale conflicts so Sudan, Sudan, DRC, Afghanistan, the Yemen Republic, Somalia, even with Syria there as well. And the capacity side figure three we have so Sudan smaller countries but typically these are countries that are performing economically less well than others. But it's the legitimacy scores that I want to draw your attention to. Here we have a grab bag of countries that typically we wouldn't necessarily think are our fragile. Now all that red means is that these countries are performing 6.5 or higher on our scale. So we have yes some countries that that we would identify as being less legitimate than others but also for example North Korea, Swaziland, Ethiopia, Haiti, Myanmar that don't typically rank that high on overall fragility indices. If we do break it down the ALC scores by region we see that Sub-Saharan Africa is by far the most challenged in terms of these overall scores but South Asia is not far behind in some particular areas of authority and capacity. But then you draw your attention to the Middle East and North Africa see where its legitimacy scores outrank anything else in that in the other three dimensions of fragility. So we believe actually our research has found that the legitimacy was a key driver of the Arab Spring. It wasn't so much lack of economic development or poor governance but rather illegitimate governance that was driving the uprisings in some of these countries. Gender equality being a primary example of that but also access to entitlements, access to influence in the government and so on. Regional clusters, Sub-Saharan Africa performs least well in the six cluster dimensions of governance, economic security and crime, demography, environment and gender. However it does reasonably well on the security and crime side than it does in comparison to South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. Now we don't have time to nuance this it may be a function of reporting and so on but you see it's not once we get into more detailed assessments or profiling of these regions we see that performance overall is quite varied. For South Asia the economic performance is probably the most problematic and that's largely driven by Afghanistan to some extent Bangladesh and possibly even Pakistan. To push it even further and again these more detailed assessments can be located in the report. South Sudan is our most fragile country with Somalia if not far behind but you can see by profiling them in this way that they are fragile for different reasons and it's this level of nuance and one can drill even deeper and look at individual indicators where these countries are performing poorly or well that allow policymakers to determine where they might want to allocate their resources. So one can draw a more specific profile for a country over time or a single year and then derive I think more meaningful pulse and implications from that kind of assessment than a one-size-fits-all single rank index. Just moving ahead a little bit in terms of some of the key findings related to this conference on refugees I thought it would be interesting to look we see that in terms of refugees produced some fragile states in fact are producing more refugees than others but the overall trend line here is one suggesting that increasing fragility is associated with increasing refugees produced. We tried also to evaluate intake of refugees or hosted refugees and it wasn't as strong it was a relationship looking at simple correlation but at the present there is a indicative relationship there. So this suggests that fragile states are burdened not only through the departure of refugees but also through hosting them as well. Environmental performance somewhat weaker relationship but nevertheless a trend line showing that in terms of environmental overall environmental performance that would include drought, arable access to arable land and so on environmental protection that fragile states perform not as well as others. Now turning to classification which I really wanted to draw your attention to the fragility trap because this is something that is not well researched there's only one world bank paper documenting the existence of a fragility trap and that paper does not actually specify a model but hazards a guess on what might be the causes of the fragility trap including corruption, extreme poverty, lack of property rights and presence of conflict. The authors of that paper don't actually test that they just assume that those are the key things that are driving fragility traps in sub-Saharan Africa so we're going to take a shot at trying to develop a more accurate assessment of the fragility trap. To do that we need to know something about the countries that are not only stuck in a fragility trap those that have successfully exited and those that are fluctuating in and out of fragility and by that I mean extreme cases. So here we have those countries that are stuck in a fragility trap. Now some of these you might recognize like fragile states from any index but some you may be actually surprised by. For example Afghanistan, Burundi over the last 35 years Afghanistan is ranked in the top 20 almost every single year and it's shown extreme levels of fragility 27 times of those 35 years. Burundi very close behind Chad DRC Ethiopia. Now we come to some an interesting finding Pakistan. Pakistan is a middle income country. Why is it here? It's what we call middle income failed and fragile state has ungovernable spaces or ungoverned spaces but it also performs very poorly on legitimacy scores and to some extent authority capacity scores. So it shows up on our rankings. This is a 35 year period and is considered to be stuck in a fragility trap. This should trigger you to rethink your idea of what constitutes fragility. When you're dealing with countries like Pakistan and to some extent Uganda and Yemen these are countries that are not dependent on aid to the same extent that for example Somalia or possibly Burundi would be or Afghanistan for that matter. Question then becomes how does one engage these countries where aid dependence is not nearly as high. So here we have I think clear evidence of a fragility trap using our data and here's an example of Afghanistan increasing fragility over time trend line upwards overall fragility fluctuating but nevertheless increasing fragility. Now this is from 1980 to 2013-2012. This despite our massive interventions in the billions of dollars notwithstanding what Fintharp said earlier there are examples in which our aid is certainly not delivered the kind of results we expected. To assume that there is a one-size-fits-all policy even for the most extremely fragile states I think would be misguided. We have poor policy environments to begin with in these extremely fragile states and we need to rethink exactly how they can be engaged. More specifically here's a couple of other examples Yemen and Pakistan measuring the fragility trap over time we've evaluated their performance not only on the overall fragility but also the authority legitimacy and capacity scores and you can see that the overall trend lines are upwards so their fragility is increasing over time despite some of the interventions we've undertaken in these countries. Granted there are down so the upward line is obviously increasing fragility decreases are associated with successful interventions. What we don't know and what we want to know in our future research and what we've published with the in the third world quarterly piece is the sequencing in which one has to engage these countries. Does authority generate greater capacity which in turn generates greater legitimacy or is it something else? Here are the countries that have exited or stabilized. Now earlier we just heard that Mozambique is a success story and we've heard earlier that it's also I was on a panel where they said basically it's undergoing a crisis and it's had to devalue its currency so take it as you will is it a country that's successful or is it a country that is going to engage witness in other crisis. Our evidence suggests that it has over the last 35 years been a success story but nevertheless looking at Mozambique you can see that disturbing upward trend in the last couple of years especially on the economic performance measures of capacity and so on but there's upward trends elsewhere in particular in its overall fragility score but lesser so in the legitimacy and authority scores. Bangladesh on the other hand I think one could say is a success story so far we've done the preliminary work on why Bangladesh could be considered a success and it comes down to good leadership making wise decisions at key points or key junctures in that government's trajectory in which decisions could have been taken that would undermine effective growth and we're not instead that countries managed to consolidate some of the economic gains and build on and move out of extreme fragility. And then out countries countries that have typically fallen back into our top 20 and sometimes exit. Mali I think more than any other country in Africa possibly the world is experienced more coups. 50 I think 50 coups. This is problematic but it's reflected in our data where you've got a country that's boom boom boom boom boom boom moving along quite nicely and then undergoes a coup. Pritchett and a few others have described this as isomorphic mimicry where the country emulates the kinds of institutional development that we would expect of a country that's exiting fragility only to fall back into sort of failure or fragility mode. It's an interesting way of assessing it that there's an emulation process going on here or premature load bearing which is another instance where you're putting too much too many resources into a country with high expectations and expecting a quick turnaround. Mali certainly may be an example that Laos on the other hand has shown extreme fragility with some stabilization the last five or six years. So we're now going to move to the final part of our presentation time permitting to an preliminary identification of what might explain the fragility trap and to do that since there's so little research on it we had to go dig around and look at some of the other literature on so-called traps and we identified four related potentially related traps one being the poverty trap which some of you may be familiar with the conflict trap the capability trap and the legitimacy trap each of these are documented in some research each of them are an explanation of why states reach a sort of a status static point in equilibrium in which they're incapable of emerging the poverty trap is simply a situation where people are so poor they can't save to generate enough growth in that country's economy it has been to some extent discredited by Easterly and a few others but we thought we would test it anyway. The conflict trap Paul Colley and others have tested this and there seems to be some evidence that those countries and we heard it earlier those countries that have experienced conflict are more likely a great higher probability of going of experiencing renewed conflict with the within the next five years. So the conflict trap suggests that those if you're stuck in a conflict situation is particular with other facets of your country's structures being undermined you're going to re-experience conflict capability trap taps into weak administrative apparatus and inability to provide proper public administration and service delivery legitimacy traps on the other hand are more difficult to pin down there's only one or two books on this topic including a UNU volume on the on the question but legitimacy traps really relate to strengthened capacity within a state in other words a country has reasonably good economic performance but lacks an effective social contract a binding contract between between the people in a state. Pakistan strikes me as a country stuck in a legitimacy trap it's a country that has performed reasonably well in terms of poverty reduction and economic performance but lacks legitimacy largely because of weak institutions and we always seem to fall back on that argument of weak institutions without actually unraveling. So now we hypothesized that all four of these might inform a fragility trap so we're going to now determine whether or not that's the case so what we did is we lined up all our non-trapped countries compared that to all non-advanced countries in other words the developing countries and compared that to the trapped countries and what we find initially was quite interesting at least from my perspective what we expected to find was the poverty trap would be an overwhelming influence in determining whether and why a country was stuck in fragility in fact that does not appear to be the case what we see here the negative correlations these are simple correlation matrices the GDP per capita is negative for the non-advanced countries as we would expect it to be for the non-trapped countries but it's actually positive for the trapped countries which means that GDP per capita or poverty is not associated with clearly associated with fragility increasing levels of poverty are not associated with low levels of fragility conflict on the other hand has a weak correlation here unlike for the for the trapped countries government and effectiveness on the other hand strongly negatively correlated as is voice and accountability these are proxy measures for each of those traps that we identified earlier the latter two being governance matters world bank data sources the other two being the conflict measure being an UPSLA data source and GDP per capita you're familiar with so what and then there was a more sophisticated regression analysis that we did which confirms our findings so far of course these are preliminary this has takes into account lags fixed effects and so on and again we see that GDP per capita is not strong the relationship there is not strong for the most fragile states for really trapped countries whereas conflict government effectiveness which is a measure of authority and voice and accountability which is a measure of legitimacy are so what can we conclude from this and where might we go if time permitting I'll I'll just take conclude draw up some conclusions from this authority which is a measure of government effective measured by government effectiveness and to a certain extent conflict intensity and legitimacy voice and accountability are the key structural characteristics that correlate the most with fragility for those countries that are trapped in fragility capacity or income per capita and poverty is not significant improvements in capacity do not guarantee that countries will be able to escape the fragility trap especially when corresponding improvements are not happening to authority and legitimacy capacity becomes important once countries are able to exit the fragility trap now that if you look back at our list of the most fragile countries are those stuck in a fragility trap you can see why we get findings like that because we've got the myths in there the middle income failed in fragile states we've got countries that are not necessarily mired in extreme poverty so this gets us to rethinking about how we would would sequence out our entry points into the most fragile states those that are trapped in fragility and shows no sign of exit we need to think more clearly about just putting money into these countries that typically have poor policy environments and suffer from premature load bearing or are simply not capable of absorbing the level of aid that we deliver to them Afghanistan being a clear case of being overrated Haiti as well this suggests that obviously we need to think more specifically about how to more effectively allocate these kinds of resources and target not only just economic development but governance good governance questions of legitimacy and horizontal equality it also suggests that we need to think more specifically how we sequence that out and how they relate to one another for example ours is a strengthening of the authority structure going to ultimately lead to strengthening of the capacity structure you can imagine a state which is extremely illegitimate not being able to govern effectively and not being able to effectively allocate resources so maybe we should start with legitimacy and that I don't think we should equate with elections we need to think more specifically about the social contract and good governance and that's something I think that typically economists are not all that comfortable doing they are very happy to work on GDP per capita but now there's opportunity here to focus on other measures of government performance including things like legitimacy accountability the social contract horizontal equality and I'll stop there