I don't know that human rights can create good government, but it seems pretty reliable that societies without strong human rights protections will turn into a weird pyramid scheme for someone and then collapse in relatively short order.
The military’s power over Myanmar hasn't collapsed in a half-century. (Even during the ostensible moves towards democracy in recent years, the military still called all the shots.) They seem to have established a pretty solid dictatorship. Also, the creation of a new capital at Naypyidaw, in the middle of nowhere, is said to have been an attempt at making the regime impervious to any large-scale public protests.
What conclusion can be drawn, then, regarding Myanmar’s growth experience from independence in 1948 up to the end of the 1990s? If we wish to be unkind, we can say that Myanmar is a subsistence agricultural economy, relying on a few commodities, with a pre-industrial economic structure, which has no shock absorbers to cushion the impact of events originating within and outside the country. Natural and human-made disasters, therefore, windfalls from the bounty of nature and commodity booms that resulted from such events as the Korean War largely determined the state of the economy, rather than factors such as the GDI/GDP ratio.
Such unkind views can, however, no longer hold with the official data for Myanmar’s economic performance coming into the new millennium. In biblical times, it was possible for a country’s economy to enjoy seven fat years in a row and then to suffer seven lean years in a row. Not anymore! Global warming, a growing menace, has brought with it climate change that has made weather volatile and erratic. There is no way a country can expect to have seven consecutive years of good harvests in the twenty-first century.
That was written back in 2005 and it looks like their GDP predictions have turned out to be correct with a big drop in their GDP since 2005.
For any given area, you will always be able to find an answer to "who's in charge here?," but I think there needs to be some degree of comprehensiveness and inclusion to call that authority "society."
For instance - in colonial states the "authority" is the colonial administrator - who are almost totally separate from the "society" of the country. I should have been more clear with terms in my first post. Trying again:
Strong human rights protections help guarantee that the administrative power of a state spends some time including all the people within its borders. Once those rights fall away, the chance of the state becoming more exclusionary and focused on the rights of a limited subset of the people within its borders seems high.
A military junta, for instance, is primarily concerned with keeping the military in power and doesn't devote attention or resources to much else.
