This article presents estimates of six dimensions of governance for 199 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002 developed in the context of an ongoing project to measure governance across countries. Section one describes the data used in developing this round of the governance...

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...

The Worldwide Governance Indicators, reporting estimates of six dimensions of governance for over 200 countries between 1996 and 2005, have become widely used among policymakers and academics. They have also attracted some explicit written criticisms. In this short paper the authors synthesize...

The authors report on the latest version of the worldwide governance indicators, covering 213 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance from 1996 until end-2005: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory...

Using economic rates of return from more than 1,200 public and private sector projects implemented in 61 developing countries, the authors analyze determinants of investment productivity. Results from Tobit estimation demonstrate that the degree of countrywide policy distortions - macroeconomic,...

Is it true that bribery can alleviate red tape for enterprises? Not if bureaucrats can choose the regulatory burden and the red tape delay to extract bribes. The authors' empirical test finds that firms using bribes waste more management time dealing with bureaucrats. The business community can...

There is a strong statistical link between a country's civil liberties and the performance of its aid-financed govern-ment investment projects. But type of political regime (whether authoritarian or democratic) and the status of more purely political liberties do not appear to significantly...

Poor governance can affect greatly public service delivery, both directly through higher price, and indirectly through lower quality or quantity available. When seeking a public service, users may be required to pay in bribes significantly more than the official price. Consequently, some users...