Governance Indicators

By Daniel A. Kaufmann, Aart C. Kraay. 2007

603 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Scholars, policymakers, aid donors, and aid recipients acknowledge the importance of good governance for development. This understanding has spurred an intense interest in more refined, nuanced, and policy-relevant indicators of governance. In this paper we review progress to date in the area of measuring governance, using a simple framework of analysis focusing on two key questions: (i) what do we measure? and, (ii) whose views do we rely on? For the former question, we distinguish between indicators measuring formal laws or rules'on the books', and indicators that measure the practical application or outcomes of these rules'on the ground', calling attention to the strengths and weaknesses of both types of indicators as well as the complementarities between them. For the latter question, we distinguish between experts and survey respondents on whose views governance assessments are based, again highlighting their advantages, disadvantages, and complementarities. We also review the merits of aggregate as opposed to individual governance indicators. We conclude with some simple principles to guide the refinement of existing governance indicators and the development of future indicators. We emphasize the need to: transparently disclose and account for the margins of error in all indicators; draw from a diversity of indicators and exploit complementarities among them; submit all indicators to rigorous public and academic scrutiny; and, in light of the lessons of over a decade of existing indicators, to be realistic in the expectations of future indicators.

Subfields: Development

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/05da7acfb7a700342512a1e408e56468f30d55ce

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Citations in the corpus

• Good Governance and Happiness in Nations: Technical Quality Precedes Democracy and Quality Beats Size (2010, neutral): “, by Kaufmann and Kraay (2008).”
• What Do Corruption Indices Measure (2014, background): “Kaufmann et al. (2007) and Kaufmann and Kray (2008) provide a good survey of methodological objections and responses, focusing on the WB indicators.”
• Measuring the World (2011, background): “Many indicators are composites of other indicators, a blending and weighting of established indicators into a new bundle (see Kaufmann and Kraay 2007).”
• Why Firms Engage in Corruption: A Top Management Perspective (2009, background): “Nonetheless, despite substantial efforts to combat corruption through public and private initiatives, widely accepted measures of corrupt activity reveal that illegal corrupt transactions are as prevalent as ever in most countries and on the rise in others (Kaufmann and Kraay, 2008; Lambsdorff, 2006”
• This Mine is Mine! How Minerals Fuel Conflicts in Africa (2015, positive): “30 We make use of the Worldwide Governance Indicators dataset from Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi ( 2013 ) . four The indicators of this dataset are based on a great number of individual variables from 32 data sources.”