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The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) is a project that reports both aggregate and individual governance indicators for over 200 countries and territories covering the period from 1996 to 2021. It considers six dimensions of governance:[1]
These aggregate indicators are based on the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen, and expert survey respondents in both industrial and developing countries. The indicators draw from over 30 individual data sources produced by a variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and private sector firms.[2]
The 2022 WGI update includes significant revisions to the underlying source data, which affect the data for earlier years in the WGI dataset. This latest release supersedes previous releases.[3]
Creating a set of indicators for the World Governance Index (WGI) is a comprehensive and complex process. The objective is to measure a modern concept that, despite its historical roots,[4] is currently applied in certain frameworks and implemented by identified entities.[5] Although there is agreement on diagnosing its challenges,[6] it is still far from being fully "stabilized".
Drawing from the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which was unanimously adopted by heads of state and government in 2000, a team of researchers from the Forum for a new World Governance (FnWG), consisting of Gustavo Marín, Arnaud Blin, and Renaud François, concentrated their research on five core concepts that outline the application framework of world governance and represent key objectives to be achieved by 2015:
The research team considered its mission with two goals in mind:
| Indicator | Sub-indicator | Index |
|---|---|---|
| Peace / Security | National Security | Conflicts |
| Refugees / Asylum Seekers | ||
| Displaced Persons | ||
| Public Security | Political climate | |
| Degree of trust | ||
| Violent Crime | ||
| Homicides / 100,000 inhabitants | ||
| Rule of Law | Body of Laws | Ratification of International Treaties |
| Protection of Property Rights | ||
| Legal System | Independence | |
| Effectiveness | ||
| Settlement of Contractual Disputes | ||
| Corruption | Corruption Perceptions Index | |
| Human Rights / Participation | Civil and Political Rights | Respect of Civil Rights |
| Respect of Physical Integrity Rights | ||
| Freedom of the Press | ||
| Violence against the Press | ||
| Participation | Participation in Political Life | |
| Electoral Process and Pluralism | ||
| Political Culture | ||
| Discrimination / Gender Inequalities | Women's Political Rights | |
| Women's Social Rights | ||
| Women's Economic Rights | ||
| Female Parliamentary Rate | ||
| Sustainable Development | Economic Sector | Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita |
| GDP Growth Rate | ||
| Inflation Rate | ||
| Ease in starting a business | ||
| Social Dimension | Poverty Rate / Inequalities (Gini Coefficient) | |
| Unemployment Rate | ||
| Ratification of International Labor Law Treaties | ||
| Environmental Dimension | Ecological Footprint / Biocapacity | |
| Environmental Sustainability | ||
| Environmental Performance Index | ||
| Human Development | Development | Human Development |
| Well-being / Happiness | Subjective Well-being | |
| Happiness |
The 37 indexes constituting the WGI have been set on a scale from zero to one, a scale similar to the one developed by the United Nations Development Programme for its Human Development Index (HDI).
Although some of the indexes used (only 4 out of the 37) were drawn from databases that had not been updated since 2007, the 2008 World Governance Index nevertheless reflects the state of world governance in 2008.
The regional rankings are inspired from UNDP classification. The 179 countries surveyed in this study —microstates were deliberately not included in this list – were grouped into six regional subgroups:
World Governance Index: PDF document, 81 pages.