Worldwide Governance Indicators

Voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence or terrorism, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. The first two capture the process by which governments are selected and held accountable; the middle two capture the capacity to formulate and implement sound policies; and the last two capture respect for the institutions governing economic and social interactions. Each is estimated separately from its mapped sources.

Because each score is a statistical estimate combining many noisy sources, not a direct measurement. The unobserved-components model yields a standard error that reflects how many sources informed the estimate and how much they disagreed. The confidence interval tells users when two countries' governance levels are statistically indistinguishable. Ignoring the intervals and ranking countries on tiny differences is the single most common misuse the WGI authors warn against.

Cautiously. The indicators are designed for over-time comparison and the underlying scores are anchored so that the global average stays roughly constant, but changes in which sources are available for a country can affect its score independently of real change. Because the scores are relative to the global distribution, an unchanged absolute position can still shift a percentile rank. Meaningful trend analysis checks statistical significance and reads the documented changes in source coverage.