Bureaucracy and Counting

Tim Harford has a piece at Slate: Who's the Greatest Artist of the 20th Century?
He uses this research to segue into bureaucracy:

"My former colleagues at the World Bank have also been counting away: How many official signatures does a farmer in the Central African Republic need to obtain before he's able to get his bananas on a ship bound for America or Europe? 38. How many official procedures must a businessman in Lagos go through in order to legally buy a warehouse? 21.

This kind of counting—done with the help of local lawyers and public officials—shares common ground with Galenson's work. It transforms a qualitative impression ('Nigerian bureaucracy is painful') into a quantitative fact; it does so through the intermediation of experts, and uses a perfectly transparent process."

There's a topic for someone--what history explains the cumbersome bureaucracy often found outside the developed world. (See De Soto's work for further discussion.)

(Who's the greatest artist: Picasso)