News release: “This year’s updated version of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) compiled by World Bank researchers shows many developing country governments making important gains in control of corruption, and some of them matching rich country performance in overall governance measures…This year’s study is the seventh update of the WGI, a decade-long effort by the researchers to build and update the most comprehensive cross-country set of governance indicators currently available…The Indicators cover 212 countries and territories, drawing on 35 different data sources to capture the views of tens of thousands of survey respondents worldwide, as well as thousands of experts in the private, NGO, and public sectors. The WGI are used by policymakers and civil society groups worldwide as a tool to assess governance challenges and monitor reforms, and by scholars researching the causes and consequences of good governance.”

Governance Matters VII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators, 1996-2007. Kaufmann, Daniel, Kraay, Aart and Mastruzzi, Massimo, June 24, 2008. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1148386
• “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 2007: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. The latest aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 32 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. We also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. We also briefly describe the evolution of the WGI since its inception, and show that the margins of error on the aggregate governance indicators have declined over the years, even though they still remain non-trivial. We find 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.”