Worldwide Governance Indicators

 

 

International Institute for Governance & Leadership (IIGL) strongly advocates the Worldwide Governance Indicators  (WGI), produced by:

 

Daniel Kaufmann, Revenue Watch and Brookings Institution

Aart Kraay, World Bank Development Research Group

Massimo Mastruzzi, World Bank Institute

 

 

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 215 economies over the period 1996–2012, for six dimensions of governance

Source: http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home

 

 

In a cross-section of more than 150 countries, Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobatón provide new empirical evidence of a strong causal relationship from better governance to better development outcomes. They base their analysis on a new database containing more than 300 governance indicators compiled from a variety of sources.

 

 

They provide a detailed description of each of these indicators and sources. Using an unobserved components methodology (described in the companion paper by Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobatón, “Aggregating Governance Indicators”, Policy Research Working Paper 2195), they then construct six aggregate indicators corresponding to six basic governance concepts:

 

 

1. Voice and accountability: captures perceptions of the extent to which a country’s citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media.

 

 

2. Political stability and absence of violence: measures perceptions of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including politically-motivated violence and terrorism.

 

 

3. Government effectiveness: captures perceptions of the quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of its independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to such policies.

 

 

4. Regulatory quality: captures perceptions of the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development.

 

 

5. Rule of law: captures perceptions of the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence.

 

 

6. Control of corruption: captures perceptions of the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as ‘capture’ of the state by elites and private interests.