The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project constructs aggregate indicators of six broad dimensions of governance:
Voice and Accountability
Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism
Government Effectiveness
Regulatory Quality
Rule of Law
Control of Corruption
The six aggregate indicators are based on over 30 underlying data sources reporting the perceptions of governance of a large number of survey respondents and expert assessments worldwide. Details on the underlying data sources, the aggregation method, and the interpretation of the indicators, can be found in the WGI methodology paper:
Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi (2010). "The Worldwide Governance Indicators : A Summary of Methodology, Data and Analytical Issues". World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 5430
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1682130
Full interactive access to the aggregate indicators, and the underlying source data, is available at www.govindicators.org.
Note that this Worldwide Governance Indicators update incorporates revisions to data for previous years, and so this data release supersedes data from all previous releases.
The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) are a research dataset summarizing the views on the quality of governance provided by a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries. These data are gathered from a number of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and private sector firms.