Order in the jungle

“AM I the only economist guilty of using the term [rule of law] without having a good fix on what it really means?” asks Dani Rodrik of Harvard University. “Well, maybe the first one to confess to it.”

The rule of law is usually thought of as a political or legal matter. The world’s newest country, Kosovo, says its priority is to improve the rule of law in order to reduce corruption and build up the state. But in the past ten years the rule of law has become important in economics too. Indeed, it has become the motherhood and apple pie of development economics—which makes Mr Rodrik’s confession the more striking. The rule of law is held to be not only good in itself, because it embodies and encourages a just society, but also a cause of other good things, notably growth. “No other single political ideal has ever achieved global endorsement,” says Brian Tamanaha, a legal scholar at St John’s University, New York.

Economists became fascinated by the rule of law after the crumbling of the “Washington consensus”. This consensus, which was economic orthodoxy in the 1980s, held that the best way for countries to grow was to “get the policies right”—on, for example, budgets and exchange rates. But the Asian crisis of 1997-98 shook economists’ confidence that they knew which policies were, in fact, right. This drove them to re-examine what had gone wrong. The answer, they concluded, was the institutional setting of policymaking, especially the rule of law. If the rules of the game were a mess, they reasoned, no amount of tinkering with macroeconomic policy would produce the desired results.

Order in the jungle