Governance matters VIII: aggregate and individual governance indicators 1996-2008

Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay () and Massimo Mastruzzi

No 4978, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.

Keywords: Governance Indicators; National Governance; Public Sector Corruption&Anticorruption Measures; Economic Policy; Institutions and Governance; Banks&Banking Reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-pbe and nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (496)

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Working Paper: Governance matters VII: aggregate and individual governance indicators 1996-2007 (2008)
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