Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights put it succintly: "In determining which actions or omissions amount to a violation of an economic, social or cultural right, it is important to distinguish the inability from the unwillingness of a State to comply with its treaty obligations".213 But does a low GDP per capita necessarily result in an inability to fulfil rights, and conversely, can we presume that a high GDP per capita necessarily allows a State to overcome any obstacles it may face? In some respects therefore, the approach by Fukuda-Parr and her colleagues underestimates the ability of a country to transform the conditions it is confronted with; in other respects, such an ability seems to be overestimated, and the real constraints it faces ignored. In fact, in order to assess State conduct, we need to treat the lack of implementation of social, economic and cultural rights as a question of political economy: what really matters is to whom the failure is attributable. It is this question of attribution that is at the heart of another approach, our third approach, that we may call diagnostic monitoring: the identification, by a causal analysis, of the reasons why certain outcomes are unsatisfactory, and of the measures that could be adopted to remove such obstacles. 3. Diagnostic monitoring: causality analysis Diagnostic monitoring is the label attached, for ease of exposition, to the approach initially pioneered by Eitan Felner.214 Felner proposes to use quantitative data, combined with qualitative information, in order to move from outcomes (economic and social rights deprivations and disparities of outcome) (step # 1 of the three-steps approach), to the identification of the "main determinants of these outcomes so as to identify the policy responses that can reasonably be expected of the state" (step # 2), and finally (in step # 3) to the assessment of the extent to which "deprivations, disparities and lack of progress can be traced back to failures of government policy".215 Only by identifying why a State scores poorly on certain socio-economic indicators, can certain questions be asked about State conduct: for instance, in a State with a low schooling rate for girls, whether that outcome is attributable to social or cultural norms or, instead, to the lack of economic incentives (for instance, due to discrimination against women in employment, which is a disincentive to invest in girls' education), leads to different expectations as to what the response of the State should be.216 Such a causality analysis should make it possible to identify which deprivations of social and economic rights (as measured by outcome indicators) are attributable to a failure of the State to comply with its obligations, and which are instead the result of a lack of capacity of the State. Indeed, the final stage of the analysis (step # 3) should enable the identification of "cases in which the government had the capacity to deal with some of the determinants of specific deprivations and inequalities identified in Step #2, but failed to do so".217 But how should such a capacity be assessed, and how can we determine what a reasonable response of the State should be? Felner proposes a variety of ways (five in total) to identify the relevant benchmarks. Some of the answers proposed are irrelevant to the question of how a country's responses are to be assessed where the outcomes are unsatisfactory, because, by design, they rule out the possibility that the country could invoke factors beyond its control to provide a justification for poor achievements: this corresponds to violations of the prohibition of discrimination, or of the core obligation of the State, which should not be made to depend on State capacity.218 The other answers 213 Maastricht Guidelines on Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, cited above, para. 13. Eitan Felner, "A new frontier in economic and social rights advocacy ? Turning quantitative data into a tool for human rights accountability", Sur – International Journal on Human Rights, No. 9 (2008),109-146. See also, for an operationalization of this approach, Eitan Felner, "Closing the ‘Escape Hatch’: A Toolkit to Monitor the Progressive Realization of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights", Journal of Human Rights Practice, vol. 1(3) (2009) : 402-435. 215 Felner, "A new frontier in economic and social rights advocacy ? Turning quantitative data into a tool for human rights accountability", cited above note 214, at 116. 216 Id., at 126. 217 Id., at 122. 218 This is the case where Felner notes that international human rights standards should provide the benchmark. He provides the following example : "the obligation of universal primary education sets a benchmark of 100% primary education completion rate. Comparing rates in the focus country with the relevant international human rights obligation can reveal 214 46