The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Six, One, or None?
By L. Langbein, Stephen F. Knack. 2010
487 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Aggregate indexes of the quality of governance, covering large samples of countries, have become popular in comparative political analysis. Few studies examine the validity or reliability of these indexes. To partially fill this gap, this study uses factor, confirmatory factor and path analysis to test both measurement and causal models of the six Worldwide Governance indicators. They purportedly measure distinct concepts of control of corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness, rule quality, political stability, and voice and accountability. Rather than distinguishing among aspects of the quality of governance, we find that they appear to be measuring the same broad concept.
Subfields: Law, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d63448b26e4d98997a087c2d08a9953e5ef499c
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Citations in the corpus
- Biodiversity, Governance, and the Allocation of International Aid for Conservation (2013, background): “Widely used by policymakers and researchers (Kaufmann et al. 2008; Langbein and Knack 2010), the WGI are highly correlated (as high as 0.94).”
- The institutional context of poverty: State fragility as a predictor of cross‐national variation in commercial microfinance lending (2014, methodology): “P æ è ç ö ø ÷ through the most rigorous tests for reliability and validity of the measures commonly used to capture similar concepts of state capability (Langbein and Knack, 2010).”
- “Close but no Cigar”: the measurement of corruption* (2014, methodology): “Particularly important is the finding that the indicators of the concept of corruption do not always relate systematically and reliably to how they have been defined conceptually (Arndt and Oman 2006; Langbein and Knack 2010, 351).”
- Human capital in social and commercial entrepreneurship (2016, unknown): “This may result both from the fact that the conceptual basis of their measure is weaker being more a catch-all factor rather than anchored in theory (Langbein and Knack, 2010), and it suffers from very high multicollinearity with the level of GDP per capita.”
- Institutional quality thresholds and the finance Growth nexus. (2013, background): “Langbein and Knack (2010) pointed out that the WGI essentially measures the same underlying governance concept although the six measures were meant to capture conceptually distinct dimensions.”
- Institutional Quality, Trade Openness, and Financial Sector Development in Asia: An Empirical Investigation (2016, background): “These six have high intercorrelations as they appear to measure the same broad concept (Langbein and Knack 2010).”
- Financial Development and Foreign Direct Investment—The Moderating Role of Quality Institutions (2020, background): “These indicators are reduced—in conjunction with a large variety of data—to a smaller number of indices that measure separate but interconnected issues regarding the quality of governance [64].”
- How (Not) to measure institutions (2012, background): “30 Among the critics are Arndt and Oman (2006), Knack (2006), Langbein and Knack (2010), Thomas”
- Financial Development and Income Inequality at Different Levels of Institutional Quality (2014, methodology): “The WGI institutions indicator is measured by averaging these six indicators into a single broader index (see Easterly 2002; Langbein and Knack 2010; Méon and Weill 2005). Annual data on real GDP (gross domestic product) per capita, converted to U.S. dollars based on 2005 constant prices, are from t”
- Approaching a dynamic view on the availability of mineral resources: What we may learn from the case of phosphorus? (2013, background): “This indicator consists of six sub-indicators measuring perceptions and quality of countries including political stability, absence of violence/terrorism, and regulatory quality (Langbein and Knack, 2010).”