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The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and Analytical Issues
TL;DR: The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project as mentioned in this paper is a collection of six dimensions of governance starting in 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption.
Abstract: This paper summarizes the methodology of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project, and related analytical issues. The WGI cover over 200 countries and territories, measuring six dimensions of governance starting in 1996: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. The aggregate indicators are based on several hundred individual underlying variables, taken from a wide variety of existing data sources. The data reflect the views on governance of survey respondents and public, private, and NGO sector experts worldwide. The WGI also explicitly report margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. Even after taking these margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country and over-time comparisons.
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TL;DR: The Moral Machine, an online experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles, gathered 40 million decisions in ten languages from millions of people in 233 countries and territories to shed light on similarities and variations in ethical preferences among different populations.
Abstract: With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions, and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge, we deployed the Moral Machine, an online experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. This platform gathered 40 million decisions in ten languages from millions of people in 233 countries and territories. Here we describe the results of this experiment. First, we summarize global moral preferences. Second, we document individual variations in preferences, based on respondents’ demographics. Third, we report cross-cultural ethical variation, and uncover three major clusters of countries. Fourth, we show that these differences correlate with modern institutions and deep cultural traits. We discuss how these preferences can contribute to developing global, socially acceptable principles for machine ethics. All data used in this article are publicly available.
897 citations
05 Feb 2018
TL;DR: Using indicators designed to measure a safe and just development space, the authors quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations, finding that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use.
Abstract: Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a ‘safe and just’ development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2–6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial.
811 citations
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that projected urban area expansion will take place on some of the world’s most productive croplands, in particular in megaurban regions in Asia and Africa, which adds pressure to potentially strained future food systems and threatens livelihoods in vulnerable regions.
Abstract: Urban expansion often occurs on croplands. However, there is little scientific understanding of how global patterns of future urban expansion will affect the world's cultivated areas. Here, we combine spatially explicit projections of urban expansion with datasets on global croplands and crop yields. Our results show that urban expansion will result in a 1.8-2.4% loss of global croplands by 2030, with substantial regional disparities. About 80% of global cropland loss from urban expansion will take place in Asia and Africa. In both Asia and Africa, much of the cropland that will be lost is more than twice as productive as national averages. Asia will experience the highest absolute loss in cropland, whereas African countries will experience the highest percentage loss of cropland. Globally, the croplands that are likely to be lost were responsible for 3-4% of worldwide crop production in 2000. Urban expansion is expected to take place on cropland that is 1.77 times more productive than the global average. The loss of cropland is likely to be accompanied by other sustainability risks and threatens livelihoods, with diverging characteristics for different megaurban regions. Governance of urban area expansion thus emerges as a key area for securing livelihoods in the agrarian economies of the Global South.
716 citations
Cites background from "The Worldwide Governance Indicators..."
...The quality of governance in countries with important cropland losses, however, tends to be medium to low in emerging economies and low for developing countries (48) (Table S4)....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop the institutional configuration perspective to understand which national contexts facilitate social entrepreneurship and confirm joint effects on SE of formal regulatory (government activism), informal cognitive (postmaterialist cultural values), and informal normative (socially supportive cultural norms, or weak-tie social capital) institutions.
Abstract: We develop the institutional configuration perspective to understand which national contexts facilitate social entrepreneurship (SE). We confirm joint effects on SE of formal regulatory (government activism), informal cognitive (postmaterialist cultural values), and informal normative (socially supportive cultural norms, or weak-tie social capital) institutions in a multilevel study of 106,484 individuals in 26 nations. We test opposing propositions from the institutional void and institutional support perspectives. Our results underscore the importance of resource support from both formal and informal institutions, and highlight motivational supply side influences on SE. They advocate greater consideration of institutional configurations in institutional theory and comparative entrepreneurship research.
483 citations
TL;DR: The methodology has proven to be sufficiently robust as to make it applicable across the entire spectrum of metals and organizational levels and provides a structural approach that reflects the multifaceted factors influencing the availability of metals in the 21st century.
Abstract: A comprehensive methodology has been created to quantify the degree of criticality of the metals of the periodic table. In this paper, we present and discuss the methodology, which is comprised of three dimensions: supply risk, environmental implications, and vulnerability to supply restriction. Supply risk differs with the time scale (medium or long), and at its more complex involves several components, themselves composed of a number of distinct indicators drawn from readily available peer-reviewed indexes and public information. Vulnerability to supply restriction differs with the organizational level (i.e., global, national, and corporate). The criticality methodology, an enhancement of a United States National Research Council template, is designed to help corporate, national, and global stakeholders conduct risk evaluation and to inform resource utilization and strategic decision-making. Although we believe our methodological choices lead to the most robust results, the framework has been constructe...
472 citations
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TL;DR: The 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.
3,059 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures, and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time.
Abstract: The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.
1,849 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: Kaufmann, Kraay and Zoido-Lobat as discussed by the authors presented estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002.
Abstract: The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.
1,379 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a simple variant of an unobserved component model is used to combine the information from different sources into aggregate governance indicators, which can be used to quantify the precision of both individual sources of governance data as well as the aggregated governance indicators.
Abstract: In recent years, the growing interest of academics and policymakers in governance has been reflected in the proliferation cross-country indices measuring various aspects of governance. In this paper we explain how a simple variant of an unobserved components model can be used to combine the information from these different sources into aggregate governance indicators. The main advantage of this method is that it allows us to quantify the precision of the both individual sources of governance data as well as the aggregate governance indicators. We will illustrate the methodology by constructing aggregate indicators of bureaucratic quality, rule of law, and graft, for a large sample of 160 countries. Although these aggregate governance indicators are more informative about the level of governance than any individual indicator, the standard errors associated with estimates of governance are still large relative to the units in which governance is measured.
1,078 citations
TL;DR: Kaufmann et al. as mentioned in this paper used the methodology developed in Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton to construct aggregate governance indicators for six dimensions of governance, covering 175 countries in 2000-01.
Abstract: Updated governance indicators report estimates of six dimensions of governance for 175 countries in 2000-01. They can be compared with those constructed for 1997-98. Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton construct aggregate governance indicators for six dimensions of governance, covering 175 countries in 2000-01. They apply the methodology developed in Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton ("Aggregating Governance Indicators," Policy Research Working Paper 2195, and "Governance Matters," Policy Research Working Paper 2196, October 1999) to newly available data to arrive at governance indicators comparable with those constructed for 1997-98. The data is presented in the appendix, and accessible through an interactive Web-interface at http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/govdata2001.htm. This paper - a joint product of the Development Research Group and the Governance, Regulation, and Finance Division, World Bank Institute - is part of a larger effort in the Bank to develop and analyze governance research indicators and trends worldwide. For access to the data and related papers, visit http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/pubs/govmatters2001.htm. The authors may be contacted at dkaufmann@worldbank.org or akraay@worldbank.org.
565 citations