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Making
progress in governance and in fighting corruption
Updated
Worldwide Governance Indicators shed key new insights
WASHINGTON,
— 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.
“Some countries are making rapid progress in governance,
including in Africa, showing that a measure of ‘Afro-optimism’
is called for”, said Daniel Kaufmann, co-author of the
report and Director of Governance at the World Bank Institute,
while acknowledging that the data also shows large variation
in performance across countries, and even among neighbors
within each continent. “Progress reflects reforms in
those countries where political leaders, policymakers, civil
society and the private sector view good governance and corruption
control as crucial for sustained and shared growth.”
Good governance can be found at all income levels, with some
emerging economies matching the performance of rich countries
on key dimensions of governance. Over a dozen emerging countries,
including Slovenia, Chile, Botswana, Estonia, Uruguay, Czech
Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Mauritius, and Costa
Rica score higher on key dimensions of governance than industrialized
countries such as Greece or Italy. And in many cases these
differences are statistically significant.
Over 2002-2007, the Indicators show sharp improvements in
governance, along with reversals. Examples include strong
improvements in Voice and Accountability in countries such
as Ukraine and Haiti; improvements in Political Stability
and Absence of Violence/Terrorism in Argentina; and improvements
in Control of Corruption in Georgia and Tanzania.
But despite governance gains in some countries, overall quality
of governance around the world has not improved much over
the past decade. Coinciding with countries that have done
well, a similar number have experienced deteriorations in
several governance dimensions, including Zimbabwe, Cote D’Ivoire,
Belarus, Eritrea and Venezuela. In many other countries, no
significant change in either direction is yet apparent in
recent years.
The Indicators suggest that where there is commitment to reform,
improvements in governance can and do occur. Over the past
decade from 1998-2007, countries in all regions have shown
substantial improvements in governance, even if at times starting
from a very low level. Examples include:
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Ghana, Indonesia, Liberia and Peru in Voice and Accountability;
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Rwanda, Algeria and Angola in Political Stability and Absence
of Violence/Terrorism;
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Afghanistan, Serbia and Ethiopia in Government Effectiveness;
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Georgia and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Regulatory
Quality;
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Tajikistan in Rule of Law; and
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Liberia and Serbia in Control of Corruption.
“The WGI and other efforts to measure are useful in prompting
public discussion of governance challenges and successes”
said Aart Kraay, coauthor of the WGI and lead economist in
the Development Research Group of the World Bank. “But
at the same time, discussions of governance based on empirical
measures need to be realistic about the limits of existing
data. In this respect it is important that users take seriously
the margins of error reported in the WGI, which reflect the
inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind
of data.”
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 newly released set of the six updated
aggregate indicators, as well as data from the underlying
sources, are at www.govindicators.org. 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.
Better governance helps in the fight against poverty and improves
living standards. Research over the past decade shows that
improved governance raises development, and not the other
way around. When governance is improved by one standard deviation,
infant mortality declines by two-thirds and incomes rise about
three-fold in the long run. Such an improvement in governance
is within reach, since it is a fraction of the difference
between the worst and best performers. For example, in the
dimension of Rule of Law, one standard deviation is all that
separates the very low ratings of Somalia or Afghanistan from
countries such as Kenya and Bolivia; or what separates these
countries from countries such as Ghana or Egypt; or in turn
what separates Ghana or Egypt from Portugal or Estonia; or
what separates these from the best performers such as Denmark
or Switzerland.
Good governance has also been found to significantly enhance
the effectiveness of development assistance in general, and
of World Bank-funded projects in particular.
“Until the mid-nineties, I did not think that governance
could be measured. The Worldwide Governance Indicators have
shown me otherwise” says Shlomo Yitzhaki, Director of
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics and Professor of
Economics at the Hebrew University. “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.”
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