Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

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.

Accountability --- Aggregate governance indicators --- Aggregate indicators --- Citizen --- Corruption --- Corruption perceptions --- Country estimate --- Economic Policy, Institutions and Governance --- Governance --- Governance Indicators --- Government effectiveness --- Institutional quality --- Investment climate --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Measurement error --- Measuring governance --- National Governance --- Perceptions index --- Political stability --- Public Sector Corruption and Anticorruption Measures --- Public Sector Development --- Regulatory quality --- Rule of law --- Transparency --- Unobserved components model --- Worldwide governance indicators