"Not all bad government is due to politics"

These researchers mailed letters to wrong addresses in 159 countries (including the U.S. and Ghana), collected data on whether the letters were returned to the sender, and then looked at the factors associated with the letter return rate. Some fun findings:

• Most of the countries that sent letters back were the ones you'd expect-- the U.S., Luxembourg,-- but Algeria also made the list.
  
• The wrong addresses were generated by using the names of Nobel Laureates in economics and famous composers for the street names.
• Postal resources (number of workers and offices per capita) and technology (use of postcode databases) explain almost half of the variation in return rate.
• Countries with bad private sector management indicators also had worse return rates, suggesting that low productivity and poor management practices are endemic in some countries, rather than public-sector specific. 
• Countries with private postal delivery fared no better than those with public.
  

Ghana failed to return a single letter. It's also often hard to get servers to bring you a bill at a restaurant. Is it really so surprising that the public and private sectors would face the same challenges?