"Until the mid-nineties, I did not think that governance could be measured. The Worldwide Governance Indicators have shown me otherwise…. It constitutes the state of the art on how to build periodic governance indicators which can be a crucial tool for policy analysts and decision-makers benchmarking their countries. Uniquely, it publicly discloses the aggregated and disaggregated data, as well as the estimated margins of error for each country. It definitely sets a standard for transparency in data.”
Shlomo Yitzhaki,
Director of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics and Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University |
The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project
reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 212 countries and territories over the period 1996–2007, for six dimensions of governance:
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Voice and Accountability |
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Political Stability and Absence of Violence |
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Government Effectiveness |
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Regulatory Quality |
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Rule of Law |
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Control of Corruption |
The aggregate indicators combine the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. The individual data sources underlying the aggregate indicators are drawn from a diverse variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and international organizations.
The six aggregate indicators and the underlying data sources can be viewed interactively on the Governance Indicators webpage of this site. To download the full dataset for all countries and indicators in Excel format, click here. Documentation of the latest update of the WGI can be found in "Governance Matters VII: Governance Indicators for 1996–2007." Further documentation and research using the WGI is available on the Resources page of this website or at www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance.
Disclaimer: The aggregate indicators do not reflect the official views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. The WGI are not used by the World Bank Group to allocate resources or for any other official purpose. |
