Development Centre Studies Uses And Abuses Of Governance Indicators

This study helps users find their way through the jungle of governance indicators, and shows how they tend to be widely misused both in international comparisons and in tracking changes in individual countries.

Informal institutions — family and kinship structures, traditions, and social norms — are often decisive factors in shaping policy outcomes and this book advocates a pragmatic way of dealing with them.

Abstract: The Worldwide Governance Indicators, reporting estimates of six dimensions of governance for over 200 countries between 1996 and 2005, have become widely used among policymakers and academics. They have also attracted some explicit written criticisms. In this short paper the authors synthesize 11 critiques offered by four recent papers. They then refute them as either conceptually incorrect or empirically unsubstantiated.

As difficult as it might seem to define governance, it appears to be that much more difficult to measure it. Since the World Bank Institute launched the Worldwide Governance Indicators in the late 1990s, the governance indicators field has flourished and experienced significant advances in terms of methodology, data coverage and quality, and policy relevance. Other major initiatives have added to a momentum that propelled research on governance indicators seen in few other academic fields in the economic and social sciences. Given these developments and the prominence and policy relevance the field of governance indicator research has achieved, the time is ripe to take stock and ask what has been accomplished, what the shortcomings and potentials might be, and what steps present themselves as a way forward. This volume-- the fifth edition in an annual series tackling different aspects of governance around the world-- assesses what has been achieved, identifies strengths and weaknesses of current work, and points to issues that need to be tackled in order to advance the field, both in its academic importance as well as in its policy relevance. In short, the contributions to this volume explore the scope of existing governance indices and indicator frameworks, elaborate on current challenges in measuring and analysing governance, and consider how to overcome them.

Abstract: This paper reports on the latest update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2006: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. This latest set of aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance taken from 33 data sources provided by 30 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector, and nongovernmental organization experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The paper also explicitly reports the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. It finds that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons, as well as monitoring progress over time. In less than a decade, a substantial number of countries exhibit statistically significant improvements in at least one dimension of governance, while other countries exhibit deterioration in some dimensions. The decade-long aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated individual indicators, are available in a newly-redesigned website at www.govindicators.org.

This report proposes a practical, country-based framework for developing good governance indicators for programmes funded by the European Union.

This volume brings together both academic and institutional perspectives to examine the production, use and contestation of indicators in global governance. It provides a unique and comprehensive guide to the latest research in the study of indicators and their use in global governance and policy making. The editors provide a guide to the recent vast body of literature and practice on measuring governance and measurement as governance at the global level, and present a state-of-the-art analysis of social science research on indicators at both the transnational and the global level. The Handbook brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, as well as policy-makers from international organisations and non-government organisations working in the field. This volume will be a valuable resource for students and academics in the fields of public policy, administration and management, international relations, political science, law, and globalisation, as well as policy makers and practitioners.