This paper provides an overview of the data sources and aggregation methodology for the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI). The WGI report six aggregate governance indicators measuring Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption in a sample of 214 economies over the period 1996–2023. The aggregate indicators combine information from 35 different existing data sources, capturing subjective perceptions of the quality of various dimensions of governance reported by experts and survey respondents worldwide. The paper briefly discusses how to use reported margins of error when interpreting cross-country and over-time differences in the aggregate indicators. The paper also updates and extends earlier analysis on three key issues relating to the WGI methodology: (a) the effect of correlated perception errors, (b) the robustness of the aggregate indicators to alternative weighting schemes, and (c) the existence on trends in global averages of governance.
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- “ Kaufmann, Daniel ; Kraay, Aart . 2024 . The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and 2024 Update . Policy Research Working Paper; 10952 . © Washington, DC: World Bank . http://hdl.handle.net/10986/42373 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO . ”
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- Policy Research Working Papers
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- http://dx.doi.org/10.1596/1813-9450-10952
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- 34417721
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- 34417721
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- 58
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- Policy Research Working Paper; 10952
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- WPS10952
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- CC BY 3.0 IGO
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- World Bank
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- https://hdl.handle.net/10986/42373
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- 2024-11-07
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Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction 4
- 2. Data 7
- 2.1 Six Governance Dimensions 7
- 1. Voice and Accountability VA 7
- 2. Political Stability and Absence of ViolenceTerrorism PV 7
- 3. Government Effectiveness GE 8
- 4. Regulatory Quality RQ 8
- 5. Rule of Law RL 8
- 6. Control of Corruption CC 8
- 2.2 Sources of Governance Data 9
- 2.3 How the WGI Data Sources Are Selected and Assigned to the Six Aggregate Indicators 12
- 3. Constructing Aggregate Governance Indicators 15
- 3.1 An Unobserved Components Model for Governance 16
- 4. Results 19
- 4.1 Cross Country Comparisons 19
- 4.2 Over Time Comparisons 20
- 4.3 Discussion 21
- 5. Methodological Issues 22
- 5.1 Correlated Measurement Error 23
- 5.2 Alternative Weights 26
- 5.3 Trends in Global Averages 28
- 6. Conclusions 32
- Table 1 Data Sources in the Worldwide Governance Indicators 34
- Table 2 Distribution of Types of WGI Data Sources 35
- Figure 1 Comparing Governance Across Countries 36
- Figure 2 Comparing Governance Over Time 37
- Figure 3 Trends in Correlations Among Different Types of Governance Indicators 38
- Figure 4 Comparison of Baseline WGI with Equally Weighted Alternative Estimates of Governance 39
- Figure 5 Estimated Trends in the Global Mean and Standard Deviation of Governance 40
- Annex 1 Data Sources for the Worldwide Governance Indicators 41
- WGI Code 41
- Organization Data Source Country Coverage most recent year 41
- Frequency Type Methodology and Data Availability 41
- Annex 2 Assigning Questions to Governance Dimensions 47
- Voice and Accountability Individual Indicators in 2024 WGI Update 48
- Political Stability and Absence of ViolenceTerrorism Individual Indicators in 2024 WGI Update 49
- Government Effectiveness Individual Indicators in 2024 WGI Update 50
- Regulatory Quality Individual Indicators in 2024 WGI Update 51
- Rule of Law Individual Indicators in 2024 WGI Update 52
- Control of Corruption Individual Indicators in 2024 WGI Update 53
- Annex 3 Details on the Unobserved Components Model 54
- Deriving the Unobserved Components Model 54
- Estimating the Parameters of the Unobserved Components Model 55
- References 57
