Nial Ferguson’s article approaches development from the perspective of the law. He addresses the issue of the different institutional arrangements and economic impact of systems that apply common law vs ones with French civil law. Then he gets into the impact of rule on law on country’scompetitiveness….your homework is related to this:

Homework assignment due Class 5 (next) :

In Ferguson’s article he talks about how the US ranks in terms of institutions and competitiveness. He uses 5 different sources of data and briefly explains 5 indexes.

1. IDENTIFY those 5 indexes.

2. Go to the respective sources (many if not all the websites should be listed under external links, but if not find them yourself).

3. Look up the SAME data for your country.

4. BRIEFLY explain what the index measures, how it is read and how your country does (think what makes sense, you could compare it to the rest of the world or within the region or to a neighbor, but draw some conclusion).

If your country does not appear in that index, list the index and say “no data for x” and instead try to find some other data source (any other not listed in Ferguson’s article, could be from a source I list in external links or not) that can give some sense of rule of law/institutional quality/corruption/political freedom/economic competitiveness).

Your homework should have 5 parts. Each part will analyze one index for your country. Graphs/table are optional (not required) but the most important is the wording explaining what does the data you found tell you about your country. Just listing the numbers is not enough.

P.s: see the attached file.