Worldwide Governance Indicators

Last updated

Based on a long-standing research program of the World Bank, the Worldwide Governance Indicators capture six key dimensions of governance (Voice & Accountability, Political Stability and Lack of Violence, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption) between 1996 and present. They measure the quality of governance in over 200 countries, based on close to 40 data sources produced by over 30 organizations worldwide and are updated annually since 2002.

Contents

The governance indicators contribute to the growing empirical research of governance which have provided activists and reformers worldwide with advocacy tools for policy reform and monitoring. The indicators, and the underlying data behind them, are part of the current research and opinions that have reinforced the experiences and observations of reform-minded individuals in government, civil society, and the private sector, that good governance is key for development. [1] Their growing recognition of the link between good governance and successful development, as empirical evidence suggests, [1] has stimulated demand for monitoring the quality of governance across countries and within individual countries over time. Virtually all of the individual data sources underlying the aggregate indicators are, along with the aggregate indicators themselves, publicly available.

The Worldwide Governance Indicators are a compilation of the perceptions of a very diverse group of respondents, collected in large number of surveys and other cross-country assessments of governance. Some of these instruments capture the views of firms, individuals, and public officials in the countries being assessed. Others reflect the views of NGOs and aid donors with considerable experience in the countries being assessed, while others are based on the assessments of commercial risk-rating agencies.

A complementary vision of the macro-level Worldwide Governance Indicators are the World Bank Governance Surveys, which are country level governance assessment tools developed by the World Bank Institute.

Criticisms

The Worldwide Governance Indicators offer a useful snapshot of some perceptions of a country’s quality of governance but researchers have pointed out significant problems in their construction. These critiques have been extensively rebutted by the WGI authors in several publications. [2] [3] [4]

These critics have claimed that users often fail to take into account or are not aware of their limitations. Criticisms include: [5] [6] [7]

Strengths

Despite the above noted limitations and concerns recent econometric research looking at how reliable some of these indicators are, vis-a-vis data collected from natural experiments and other observational surveys, have actually concluded that the Good Governance Indicators do in fact seem to be measuring, albeit imperfectly, levels of corruption and government effectiveness. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns". Standard indicators of the quality of life include wealth, employment, the environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, social belonging, religious beliefs, safety, security and freedom. QOL has a wide range of contexts, including the fields of international development, healthcare, politics and employment. Health related QOL (HRQOL) is an evaluation of QOL and its relationship with health.

Good governance is the process of measuring how public institutions conduct public affairs and manage public resources and guarantee the realization of human rights in a manner essentially free of abuse and corruption and with due regard for the rule of law. Governance is "the process of decision-making and the process by which decisions are implemented ". Governance in this context can apply to corporate, international, national, or local governance as well as the interactions between other sectors of society.

Three national rankings of universities in the United Kingdom are published annually – by The Complete University Guide, The Guardian and jointly by The Times and The Sunday Times. Rankings have also been produced in the past by The Daily Telegraph andFinancial Times. UK Universities also rank highly in global university rankings with 8 UK Universities ranking in the top 100 of the three major global rankings - QS World University Rankings, Times Higher Education World University Rankings and Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Governance is the process of interactions through the laws, norms, power or language of an organized society over a social system. It is done by the government of a state, by a market, or by a network. It is the decision-making among the actors involved in a collective problem that leads to the creation, reinforcement, or reproduction of social norms and institutions". In lay terms, it could be described as the political processes that exist in and between formal institutions.

Consumer confidence is an economic indicator that measures the degree of optimism that consumers feel about the overall state of the economy and their personal financial situation. If the consumer has confidence in the immediate and near future economy and his/her personal finance, then the consumer will spend more than save.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Global Reporting Initiative</span>

The Global Reporting Initiative is an international independent standards organization that helps businesses, governments and other organizations understand and communicate their impacts on issues such as climate change, human rights and corruption. GRI provides the world's most widely used sustainability reporting standards

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ease of doing business index</span> Economic index

The ease of doing business index was an index created jointly by Simeon Djankov, Michael Klein, and Caralee McLiesh, three leading economists at the World Bank Group. The academic research for the report was done jointly with professors Edward Glaeser, Oliver Hart, and Andrei Shleifer. Higher rankings indicated better, usually simpler, regulations for businesses and stronger protections of property rights. Empirical research funded by the World Bank to justify their work show that the economic growth impact of improving these regulations is strong. Though the first report was authored by Djankov, Klein, and McLiesh, and they continue to be listed as "founders" of the report, some sources attribute the genesis of the idea to Djankov and Gerhard Pohl. The report was discontinued by the World Bank on September 16, 2021, following the release of an independent audit of the data irregularities. The audit documented how bank leadership pressured experts to manipulate the results of the 2018 and 2020 Doing Business Reports.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s where-to-be-born index attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead. It is based on a method that links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys to the objective determinants of quality of life across countries along with a onward-looking elements.

The Governance and Anti-Corruption Country Diagnostics is a survey tool, which uses information gathered from in-depth, country-specific surveys of households, businesses, and public officials about institutional vulnerabilities. The tool is used by the World Bank and partner governments to measure and evaluate critical governance challenges within the public sector.

Daniel Kaufmann is the president emeritus of the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), which resulted from the merger of the Revenue Watch Institute – Natural Resource Charter. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he was previously a senior fellow, and until July 2019 served in the international board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and in a number of advisory boards on governance, anti-corruption and natural resources and has also been in high-level expert commissions such as at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Inter-American Development Bank and the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. Prior to that, he was a director at the World Bank Institute, leading work on governance and anti-corruption. He was also a senior manager and lead economist at the World Bank, writing and working on many countries around the world, and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University. He has also served in other boards and councils in the past, including at the World Economic Forum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Legatum Prosperity Index</span>

The Legatum Prosperity Index is an annual ranking developed by the Legatum Institute, an independent educational charity founded and part-funded by the private investment firm Legatum. The ranking is based on a variety of factors including wealth, economic growth, education, health, personal well-being, and quality of life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ibrahim Index of African Governance</span>

The Ibrahim Index of African Governance (IIAG), established in 2007, provides an annual assessment of the quality of governance in African countries. Compiled by combining over 100 variables from more than 30 independent African and global institutions, the IIAG is the most comprehensive collection of data on African governance.

The Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) is an extensive economic survey undertaken as a joint initiative of the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

The World Governance Index (WGI) is an indicator developed in 2008 by the Forum for a new World Governance (FnWG). It aims to provide, year on year, a precise image of the situation of world governance and of its evolution. Based on the picture it provides on where the world and its individual countries stand in terms of governance, this index is intended to allow those in charge of governance to raise the appropriate questions when thinking about solutions and remedies for what constitutes one of the major problems of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Happiness Report</span> Publication ranking national happiness based on respondent ratings of their lives

The World Happiness Report is a publication that contains articles and rankings of national happiness, based on respondent ratings of their own lives, which the report also correlates with various life factors. As of March 2022, Finland had been ranked the happiest country in the world five times in a row.

Government competitiveness is a new concept created by Tobin Im, a scholar of public administration and a professor at the Graduate School of Public Administration at Seoul National University. Since 2011, Center for Government Competitiveness (CGC) at Seoul National University has developed the Government Competitiveness (GC) index which evaluates government achievements in the various fields and furthermore provides policy recommendations to increase competitiveness of government in the future.

Joel S. Hellman is the dean and distinguished professor in the practice of development at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He was appointed in July 2015 and led the school, the oldest school of international affairs in the United States, during the celebration of its centennial anniversary in 2019. Formerly, he was chief institutional economist at the World Bank.

The government effectiveness index is an index elaborated by the World Bank Group which measures the quality of public services, civil service, policy formulation, policy implementation and credibility of a government's commitment to raise these qualities or keeping them high. This index includes 193 countries ranked from -2.5 to 2.5. It is one in a broad set of government quality indicators.

Bad governance is the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed as a consequence of decision-making. This unfavourable relationship is created as a consequence of external factors or decisions such as violation of central or acceptable norms, such as those of liberal democracy, and bad economic policy:. Bad governance collectively encompasses governance in government and corporate settings. It is the opposite of good governance. Bad governance addresses governance in a government setting but bad governance and bad government are different concepts. Bad governance encompasses a variety of situations from corruption, deceit and to passing of unfair policy. From this, it can be noted that different manifestations of bad governance can vary in severity and the potential impact in their respective setting. The World Bank has identified key indicators of governance which are used as a method to measure bad governance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">V-Dem Institute</span> Swedish research institute

The V-Dem Institute is an independent research institute founded by Professor Staffan I. Lindberg in 2014 and is funded by a number of government organizations, World Bank and several research institutions. The headquarters of the project is based at the department of political science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

References

  1. 1 2 Kaufmann, Daniel and Kraay, Aart, "Growth Without Governance" (November 2002). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2928.
  2. Kaufmann, Daniel, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi (2007). "The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Answering the Critics". World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No 4149.
  3. Kaufmann, Daniel, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi (2010). "Response to: What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure". European Journal of Development Research.
  4. Kaufmann, Daniel, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi (2010). "Response to Knack-Langbein".
  5. Arndt, C.; Oman, C. (2008). "The Politics of Governance Ratings" (PDF). Working Paper MGSoG/2008/WP003.
  6. Thomas, M. (2009). "What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?". European Journal of Development Research. 22 (1): 31–54. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.590.3190 . doi:10.1057/ejdr.2009.32. S2CID   17500256.
  7. Langbein, L.; Knack, S. (2010). "The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Six, One, or None?". Journal of Development Studies . 46 (2): 350–370. doi:10.1080/00220380902952399. S2CID   153596987.
  8. Hamilton, Alexander (2017). "Can We Measure the Power of the Grabbing Hand? A Comparative Analysis of Different Indicators of Corruption" (PDF). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper Series.