World Governance Index
Gustavo Lobo Aguilar, 2016
Definition of Governance
The traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised. This includes a) the process by which governments are selected, monitored and replaced; b) the capacity of the government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies; and c) the respect of citizens and the state for the institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them.
Statistical Metodology: Unobserved Components Model
Step 1: Standarize data from diverse sources into comparable units.All the individual variables have been rescaled to run from zero to one, with higher values indicating better outcomes.
Step 2: Construct an aggregate indicator of governance as a weighted average of the underlying source variables. The units of aggregate governance indicators have zero mean, unit standard deviation, and ranging approximately from -2.5 to 2.5.
Step 3: Construct margins of error that reflect the unavoidable imprecision in measuring governance.
About the dataset
- Six composite indicators of broad dimensions of governance covering over 200 countries since 1996.
- Based on several hundred variables obtained from 31 different data sources (www.govindicators.org).
- Draw together data on perceptions of governance.
- 21 variables, 1-5 factors to identify the indicator type and the country, 6-21 data from years 1996 to 2014.
str(wgi.df)
## 'data.frame': 7740 obs. of 21 variables:
## $ Country.Name : Factor w/ 215 levels "Afghanistan",..: 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 ...
## $ Country.Code : Factor w/ 215 levels "ABW","ADO","AFG",..: 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 ...
## $ Indicator.Type: chr "Control of Corruption" "Control of Corruption" "Control of Corruption" "Control of Corruption" ...
## $ Indicator.Name: chr " Estimate" " Number of Sources" " Percentile Rank" " Percentile Rank, Lower Bound of 90% Confidence Interval" ...
## $ Indicator.Code: Factor w/ 36 levels "CC.EST","CC.NO.SRC",..: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
## $ Y1996 : num -1,847 1 0,488 0 17,476 ...
## $ Y1998 : num -1,836 1 0,488 0 14,078 ...
## $ Y2000 : num -1,91 1 0 0 7,77 ...
## $ Y2002 : num -1,426 1 0,488 0 34,466 ...
## $ Y2003 : num -1,55 2 1,95 0 11,17 ...
## $ Y2004 : num -1,42 4 3,9 0 13,11 ...
## $ Y2005 : num -1,46 4 1,46 0 13,59 ...
## $ Y2006 : num -1,445 6 3,415 0,485 10,68 ...
## $ Y2007 : num -1,591 5 0,971 0 8,696 ...
## $ Y2008 : num -1,637 6 0,971 0 5,797 ...
## $ Y2009 : num -1,513 7 0,957 0 9,524 ...
## $ Y2010 : num -1,624 8 0,952 0 5,213 ...
## $ Y2011 : num -1,55 8 1,42 0 7,55 ...
## $ Y2012 : num -1,41 9 1,91 0 12,86 ...
## $ Y2013 : num -1,43 10 1,91 0 11,43 ...
## $ Y2014 : num -1,331 10 6,25 0,957 13,876 ...
Example of a plot
This is an example plot based on the dataset. It compares the "Control of Corruption" dimension of governance. Users will be able to select other 5 indicators, years from 1996 to 2014, any of the countries included in the origianal dataset, and also plot a trend of a given year range, country (among the previously compared) and indicator type.
