Tony Blair: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to ask you about your experience advising leaders, or interacting with them in office, and seeing how their countries progressed. How much of the variance in outcomes for countries is explained by the quality of the leadership versus other endogenous factors such as human capital, geography, etc.? The whole reason I started this institute was because the quality of governance — of which leadership is a big part — is the determinant. In today's world where capital's mobile, technology's mobile, any country with good leadership can make a success. If you take two countries side by side — same resources, same opportunities, same potential therefore — one succeeds and one fails. If you look at it, it's always about the quality of decision making. Before the Ukraine War, when both Poland and Ukraine came out of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, people would have given Ukraine as much chance as Poland of doing well. Poland today is doing really well. Why is that? Because they've joined the European Union. They've had to make huge changes and reforms. Therefore they're a successful country. Look at Rwanda and Burundi. It was Rwanda that suffered the genocide, but Rwanda today is one of the most respected countries in Africa. Look at the Korean peninsula. It’s the biggest experiment in human governance that’s ever been: North Korea and South Korea. South Korea had the same GDP per head as Sierra Leone in the 1960s. Now it's one of the top countries in the world. Do you think that's fundamentally a question of who the leadership was, like Park and South Korea? There are other factors that are obviously different between these countries. You also mentioned that leadership determines governance. But if you look at a system like the US or the UK, we've had good and bad leaders. Fundamentally, the quality of the governance doesn't seem to shift that much between who the leader is. Is the quality of governance and the quality of the institutions, separate endogenous variables from the leadership?…

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