What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure&quest

M A Thomas
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M A Thomas: The Johns Hopkins University, USA

The European Journal of Development Research, 2010, vol. 22, issue 1, 54 pages

Abstract: As policymakers and researchers focus more on the question of the impact of governance in economic development, they have required measures of the quality of governance to set policy or to conduct analyses. A number of measures of the quality of governance have been created. Among these are the Worldwide Governance Indicators, which rank countries on six aspects of ‘good governance’. Critics have focused on problems of bias or lack of comparability that raise questions about the utility of these indicators. However, a more fundamental question is that of whether the indicators have ‘construct validity’ – whether they measure what they purport to measure. This paper considers the construct validity of the indicators and raises the question of whether researchers and policymakers are relying on wrong data, rather than poor data.Les responsables politiques et les chercheurs ont besoin de mesures concrètes de la qualité de la gouvernance afin de pouvoir déterminer l’impact de celle-ci, en particulier par rapport au développement économique. Un certain nombre d’indicateurs ont récemment été créés, parmi lesquels les Indicateurs de gouvernance dans le monde de la Banque Mondiale, qui classent les pays à partir de six critères de « bonne gouvernance ». L’utilité de ces indicateurs a été mise en question pour des raisons de distorsion ainsi que des problèmes de manque de comparabilité. Cependant, une question plus fondamentale est celle de la validité théorique de ces indicateurs, c’est-à-dire, s’ils mesurent ce qu’ils prétendent mesurer. Cet article considère la validité conceptuelle de ces indicateurs et cherche à déterminer dans quelle mesure les chercheurs et les responsables politiques ne sont pas en train de se baser sur des données fausses, plutôt que des données insuffisantes.

Date: 2010
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