Political capacity, support and policies Sample Clauses

Political capacity, support and policies. To start the description of the implementation context, we will first look at the dimension ‘political capacity, support and policies’ in general. This dimension deals with several broad aspects or variables that provide a better understanding of the ‘political climate’ of a certain country. The three aspects, which are identified here – political stability, control of corruption and political participation – are considered to be important conditions for all kinds of public policies, including transport policies. It is important to note that the dimension ‘political capacity, support and policies’ has a general scope and is not focused on or limited to (A) Political Stability First, we start with the aspect of political stability. It is almost self-evident that basic political stability and the absence of violence are essential conditions for the construction and maintenance of transport infrastructure. In addition, it is also crucial for attracting private investments in infrastructure projects. This aspect is captured by the ‘political stability and absence of violence index’ developed by the World Bank. It is one of the six ‘worldwide governance indicators’, which exist since 1996 and are systematically updated since 2002 for all countries worldwide. It basically captures the perceptions of the likelihood of political instability and/or politically-motivated violence, including terrorism. It is a combination of the perceptions of a very diverse group of respondents, collected in large number of surveys and other cross-country assessments of governance. This aggregated indicator combines the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. They are based on 32 individual data sources produced by a variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and private sector firms. The practical advantages of this indicator are obvious: since 2002 systematically gathered, for all countries in our sample and freely available. The aggregated nature of the index however has of course both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is the fact that multiple viewpoints are captured, and therefore its empirical richness. Yet, it is very difficult to decompose the index into its many components which has led to some criticisms (too complex, not reproducible, etc.) (Xxxxxxxx, 2007). These formulated criticisms are actually applicable to every kind of ...