Measuring Government Effort to Respect Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights

There exist a great number of measurement projects intended to benchmark the human condition as it relates to aspirations of human dignity. One thing these efforts have in common is that they are indicators of outcomes, or records of events. Measuring outcomes is methodologically appropriate and substantively useful for a great variety of purposes. Further, some data projects include measures of legal guarantees, as well, to provide some proxy indicator of a state's intentions – often to be matched with the outcomes indicators to show gaps in law and practice as well as to examine limitations in a state's capacity to enforce law. However, the current attention being paid to economic human rights, or development rights, provides a distinct measurement challenge, as prevailing international law tasks states to do the best possible given extant resources. This is part of the framework of "progressive realization" of rights. Thus, outcomes measures of economic rights, typically based on wealth, are unfair to poorer states, by definition. In this paper, we propose a measurement of state effort to respect economic rights given available resources. We feel this substantively matches the progressive realization framework and alleviates the inequity of existing measures that are almost perfectly correlated with national wealth. As a demonstration, we produce effort scores for 100+ countries for the years 1990, 1995, and 2000. We also provide a simple examination of some possible associates of government effort to respect these rights.