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A New Set of WGIs Give Impetus to Seize the Governance Moment

  • Blog post

  • 2 October 2015

An updated edition of the Worldwide Governance Indicators, which combine the views of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries, has been released. In a Brookings Institution blog, NRGI head Daniel Kaufmann draws on developments at the UN General Assembly and elsewhere to make the point that governance is measurable and that the resulting data is a critical tool in country-level and global efforts to improve. They are based on over 30 individual data sources produced by a variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, international organizations and private sector firms.

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 215 economies over the period 1996–2014, for six dimensions of governance:

  • Voice and Accountability
  • Political Stability and Absence of Violence
  • Government Effectiveness
  • Regulatory Quality
  • Rule of Law
  • Control of Corruption

The WGI are produced by NRGI president and Brookings Institution non-resident fellow Daniel Kaufmann and Aart Kray of the World Bank Development Research Group.