 The work that we're talking about is drawing on funding from the Canadian government as well as the social sciences and humanities research council of Canada, plus draws on core insights from my time I spent at wider last fall as a visiting fellow. So we anecdotally observed that some states remain stuck in what we call a high state of fragility despite copious amounts of aid failure to reform there are questions of fungibility in other words aid finds its way into avenues for which it was not intended there are questions of selectivity and over and under funding of these fragile states despite all these concerns we observe that there are a number of states remain stuck in what we call a fragility trap. Typically we think of the fragility trap as something where there are countries with poor policy environments that the failure to effectively use absorb aid if you will or where conflict and poverty or a combination of those two things is endemic but the same is true for the most extreme cases. I mean we find that this is typical of many fragile states but can we say the same of say the top ten this is the question we're going to investigate. Unfortunately there's no sort of single causal relationship between highly trapped states and those countries that that are less trapped. In other words we find that there are instances of high levels of violence in trapped states and situations where they are not trapped. So we come to the conclusion that conflict intensity is probably not a core driver of fragility although much of the policy domain I think associates high levels of conflict with extreme cases of fragility we're going to argue that that is not the case. So we're going to look at some of the common features of fragility walking through some of the empirical results my co-author and a lot of this work is an economist also at the School of International Affairs and then present some results which we've tracked fragility over time. Time permitting we'll look at some of the implications of the differences across cases. Now there are some core studies that focus on fragility traps there was a study by the World Bank which basically identified poor property rights high levels of violence I believe low economic growth is core factors associated with fragility but those authors really don't come up with a formal causal explanation they don't have a theory they're just simply saying these are things we think that are relevant to high levels of fragility. Similar Chauvet and Collier in a very important study found that over a lengthy period of time that fragile states typically despite high levels of aid simply don't adapt reforms that are asked of them and again though they don't they don't come up with a reason as to why that behavior exists. So part of our goal is to explain why states remain trapped and moving on drawing from that analysis what way can we develop effective targeted policy interventions that will move these states out of fragility. Moving forward some of our work will be conceptual some of it is empirical some of it is case study work. Our point is that we need to ground our fragility analysis in solid empirical research but also come up with conceptual framing that would allow us to compare cases individual cases and compare those individual cases with others over time. This gives us an opportunity to look at relative stages of fragility in other words to compare states that are stuck in fragility as well as those that have exited. What we have found is that the literature is telling us that there's significant focus on fragile states especially those that remain trapped but by and large the policies aren't having the intended effects why is that. Well we came up with a an empirical reference point our own work the country indicators for foreign policy project an open source database which has collected data for over a project which is collected data for over the 25 years now we've tracked performance of states over time and we categorize them according to those that have been stuck in fragility trap those that rank highly in our index those that have moved in and out of fragility that is they shift along the index from highly highly fragile to out of the top 40 and those that have successfully exited those states that have been out of the top 40 most fragile states for the last 10 years and in doing so we're able to come up with a list that we feel comfortable making public although there are some controversy here some of you may take issue with some of these cases for a variety of different reasons this is driven largely by our own data work so your results may vary according to the sources you draw on but those states that have been remain remain in our top 10 for the last 20 years or so consist of the front fragility trap countries Afghanistan Pakistan Chad Ethiopia Sudan South Sudan Yemen DRC Somalia Burundi and Uganda those that have safely exited or stabilized and consist of Algeria Bangladesh Benin Cambodia Guatemala Malawi Mozambique and those that have moved in and out of fragility are the list that you can see there now what we're going to do later on is focus on pairs of these cases in each category to explain why we think some states have exited why others have not but for now we're just going to do some conceptual brush clearing so what we did is we looked at those countries that rank in our most extreme cases of fragility and that's the list that we produced you can see over a period of that 1980 to 2014 that's the number of times they appeared in the top 20 so that's quite significant and that's the time their fragility scores exceeded 6.5 which is in our ranking system and I don't have time to detail it would be considered highly fragile so you can see that Afghanistan outstrips all other countries in terms of extreme fragility this despite the fact of the copious amount of aid that has received over the last 20 years Burundi likewise also ranks highly but has only scored 18 times in the top and extreme cases of fragility or with a score of 6.5 or higher now countries that may stand out to you is not being near estimation fragility might include for example Pakistan what Pakistan it's a middle-income country how can it possibly be considered fragile I'll get to that in a minute similarly possibly Uganda you might you might take issue with nevertheless those are the results that we've produced now the question is why do we think those countries are there well we could look at any number of possible explanations and this is all derived from the existing economic literature poverty trap you're probably familiar with the conflict trap the capability trap and the legitimacy trap let me just briefly explain each of these to you poverty trap which has largely been debunked suggests that the poor simply not capable to accumulate and save enough money to invest and therefore remain trapped in poverty other factors including nutritional deficiencies reduce wages and so on and continue to force the quality of life downward well there is some reason to believe that some countries have experienced the poverty trap at a regional level large sample data suggests that it's periodically not true and the question is does this logic apply to our trap states the ones that we just listed conflict track trap essentially argues and you've probably heard it because Paul Collier spoken here many times that those countries that fall into civil war more likely to experience it in the future furthermore those states that are cut up in regional conflict are likely to have their economies driven downward the resource curse is often thought to be anecdotally at least empirically related to the conflict trap in other words if you're graced with the high level of resources you're more likely to find yourselves engaged in conflict again that's dependent on the region and so on capability trap is something we're less familiar with as is the legitimacy trap it is something that has been discussed and examined in detail by Pritchett and his authors and a frequent contributor to studies at the World Institute for Development Economics research but here the reference points are isomorphic mimicry and premature load bearing essentially that these states lack the ability to properly allocate resources to their populations they lack the capabilities in other words although they may have the will they may they may function democratically but the capabilities are lacking and that furthermore donors impose certain demands on them which creates what they call premature load bearing legitimacy trap is almost the opposite countries that have access to resources but as they accrue and generate greater revenue much of that doesn't trickle down and affect the population in a more positive way creating essentially weakness in the government structure of the state and generates what we call lack of legitimacy in other words a disconnect between the population and the and the government government so we have these four potential competing arguments perhaps a complementary we've proxied these with our data set so that we have some nominal measure of each so that arguably each of these should be correlating highly with the fragility trap our results well correlated correlational here also produced through regression study which you can find in our working paper that was produced for for the World Institute but also a book that was forthcoming you'll find greater detail and analysis in it essentially what we find is that the poverty the poverty trap simply doesn't hold for the most extreme cases here we have a positive relationship now if you look anecdotally again at our list of most fragile states we number amongst those couple of middle-income fragile states failed in fragile states or myths MIFFs so that it stands to reason that you know Pakistan's going to drive that up but in other words as states become more fragile at least those stuck into the bottom poverty is not strongly associated with their their characteristic of being trapped similarly conflict for the the sub-sample is weakly correlated not strong as strongly correlated for all those that might be considered fragile so we conclude on the basis of those two observations at least that probably the poverty trap doesn't resonate with the fragility travel all that strongly nor does the conflict trap there may be some mild relationship there but it's not strong where we get into some interesting relationships is in government effectiveness and voice and accountability essentially measures of legitimacy the ability of a government to effectively allocate resources provide public goods and in turn in a reciprocal way be supported by the people I guess this is the belief system that our keynote was speaking of earlier although he I don't think he parsed that out in great detail I think this is the supportive belief system that is functional in many states and lacking in the most fragile states there's a legitimacy trap I think where we want to focus our attention for a couple reasons one is it's largely neglected and poorly understood and it's difficult to do to fix because it typically policy instruments are designed for either improving the economy or reducing conflict for example so I'm not going to go belabor the results you have just sort of sort of said them and it's in in a summary form so what I'm going to do in the brief time that I have available to me is to move on to our case studies and see if we can tease out some of the great more important implications of the of the differences between those that are trapped and those that are have successfully exited so for our type one or trap states we have Yemen and Pakistan type two in and out we call them those that are moving in and out of fragility Malian Laos and type three Bangladesh and Mozambique I'll simply for purposes of simplicity refer to graphs that capture baskets of indicators associate associate with authority legitimacy and capacity which are proxies for the things I talked about earlier the conflict trap and so on we'll look at main inflection points and try to determine why there have been shifts in and out of fragility for some countries of other hasn't been the same for others so in looking at the common elements we find that all six cases that I just identified have experienced conflict at some point in their 35 year window of course a couple of those have been extreme war well others have not all have struggled with democracy some of them some are nominal democracies some are hybrid states some are quasi functional backsliding democracies nevertheless there's some evidence of democracy in at least three of the six now most importantly all six have experienced growth at some point in their 35 year history in fact Mali was in aid darling Pakistan tremendous growth yet we still classify it as a trap state why well let's look at Pakistan's fragility ranking in relative to other countries we see if you take as that baseline average that Pakistan has moved in and out of the top 20 over that time period it's spent by our estimation more time below the line than above putting it in trapped status category now it is moving up and who knows what the current government will achieve but our suggestion is that it has remained trapped for sufficiently long time that we can conclude that it has serious structural issues our trend line with the upward line suggesting increasing levels of fragility and associate with our subset categories authority legitimacy capacity also indicate that Pakistan has struggled Yemen as you know has gone through sporadic cataclysmic upheavals not withstanding the most recent case which we don't cover in this data but there has been a general upward shift in its fragility scores over time and by and large it spent more time below the line making extremely fragile than above why well what we found is three things lethal and vicious feedback loops in which the shoring up of authority structures in other words the clamping down on civil and political rights which simply leads to more uprising rebellion which in turn leads to more clamping down so in other words you know instead of an opening up the society we get a closing down elite bargaining essentially elites conspire to seek out rents either from the aid community or from a variety of different other sources including military and development assistance Yemen lack of control over ungoverned spaces and very weak patron client relationships and all ultimately a minimal commitment to reform an inability to effectively implement reform because the elites are constrained by and non-autonomous actors who are held back by the constituents they represent I don't mean the elected the electoral population but rather the people to which they are beholden moving on to Molly because they don't have a lot of time and you can access this data through our working paper as I said earlier you can see Molly has moved in and out of the fragility line putting it in what we call in and out status and it's trendwork it's upward trend suggest increasing levels of fragility over time whoops and I just lost my slides and there's Laos similar kind of problem but not quite as severe Jeremy scores being increasing significantly in the last five years or so so what makes these countries moving what suggests what is suggestive of these countries moving in and out of their high levels of fragility well they more than any other country in our study they emulate forms of democratization reform without actually implementing that reform Molly probably more than any other country in our case study a country that has claimed to implement aid reform and democratization but it's failed to do so in combination with the inability to control on undergoverned spaces and I nuanced this a bit more in our paper I know it's problematic there's a ultimately a loss of control over territory and loss of revenue associated with that keep in mind that one of decisions by the Molly elite was to decentralize and also weak in the military for fear that they the government would experience another coup while there was net result of that was a fairly weak state apparatus opening up the opportunity for incursion of twaric rebels in the north but long before that was a weakening of the state structure in the northern hinterlands Laos in similar ways is is weak but it's rent seeking elites largely benefit from the growth of its neighbors Vietnam and China and so on and so there has been some some shift of this country outwards out of fragility and there's if there's good news here it is probably that Laos will be dragged along with its regional neighbors out of fragility whereas Molly is probably likely to fall back into it now we come to our success stories and perhaps success should be in quotations because there's great deal of debate as to whether we've captured these states effectively and one of our speakers me big issue with the way we've characterized Mozambique nevertheless we do consider these countries to have successfully exited fragility you can see that Bangladesh in particular has moved thoroughly out of that top 40 ranking significantly and it won't it only really falls back into it when there's an election and there's some contestation and high levels of violence between the elected elites and it's trends not nearly as promising here you can see down the trends great post-election period but a lot of large not stellar news but certainly good news is that this country has now has a GDP per capita in Pakistan its neighbor which if you think where this country was on fact both of these countries walked into the war just prior to the onset of a period last life of candidates find a way up to the Mozambique story not nearly as good indeed you can see that downward dip in the last five years towards increasing levels of agility and for where it has probably done better in terms of legitimacy with the opening of the political process what capacity continues to struggle with capacity of reference to economic development. So why have these countries succeeded well whereas the others have not there has been commitment to reform among states essentially we get a process in Bangladesh a successful civilization keeping in mind for all intents and purposes but there has been an opening up of the political process what's most important in Bangladesh is my estimation that there's been greater inclusion of participants in the political process and despite what our keynote said today forms of what we would call virtuous corruption in which money has certainly been spent unwisely perhaps through bribes as well but that money finds its way back into the economy so as long as there is a capital flight that money is contributing to this country's growth or so the story goes in addition to that commitment to reform and certainly saw it in Mozambique's case post-peace process opening up massive transformation of political orientation there has been complementary and substitution in civil society organizations in the face of Bangladesh filling gaps where government appears to tread as incapable of engaging particularly with respect to poverty are these countries resilient that's our question here there are constraints in both cases surely a patient client relationships are holding back democratic society corruption is also a mainstream issue there human capital I think is a key driver for this country monocled system certainly there seem to be commitment in this country that this is a country that can succeed and has here's been supported in doing so by the international community Mozambique probably the last positive ending given their emerging North South divides and increasing loss of accountability which are weakening the overall economic in this country so what do we take from this fact occur when the state fails to establish strong legitimacy even in the face of improved capacity you can have a strong economy if your government isn't legitimately nice to people and we've seen that in the most extreme case of Pakistan the enemy so legitimacy for us hold the key the risk non-states phase is the closure of the political system even when economic growth is achieved so you have to have that balance in economic growth and strong political structures which are open and accountable and representative I know it sounds perhaps easy to say but that relationship between states is not an absolutely central to creating this illness more specifically and with respect to isomorphic memory you need to look closely at how a local needs interact with nationalities are they on the same page is rent seeking working to subvert the activities of the national state apparatus at the local level well this remains important for knowledge when we see a lot of localized rent seeking development community which is not constrained with the larger state apparatus. I'm going to wrap it up here with implications for policy why reforms don't work in cross-states leaders can simply perpetuate their gains if they're able to survive with a small support base they tie their own benefits to the welfare of the fence that's supposed to enter from their particular policies even if the state lacks the overwhelming ability to affect change they will not the leaks will not affect change if they don't have the autonomy to do so. They're the older sector to survive. This is crucially understanding Pakistan's situation. I'm skeptical that the current leader can actually implement reforms but I think he's too caught up in the nation. The elites in this case are large he goes around accountable they're not lacking and without being held up to account they have to lose affecting change that benefits them and not the larger population. So what do we do with all this? We need to look at the clear disconnect between the desire for reform and the allocation of aid. In particular the implication is that they need to focus more on the government whether it's indigenous or otherwise and see whether the elites are actually acting in the interests of the working population. Indigenous systems of governance in other words are absolutely crucial. If you look at the output side as well ultimately is they having an effect that is intended is service delivery improving because ultimately service delivery will be a key component in determining whether or not the state is acting in the interests of the population. We can parse that in a number of different ways and then finally talk to the population who surveys find out how they feel about the government structures in place. Do they feel that they're being treated not very well? Is there an inequitable distribution of resources? You may get different viewpoints depending on the country you're examining. One would have to guess that more positive upbeat perceptions exist than the effect as opposed to the quality.