2007b “The Worldwide Governance Indicators Project: Answering the Critiques, World Bank Policy Research Department Working Paper No.4149

In this note we summarize some recent critiques of our project to develop Worldwide Governance Indicators, as described in our series of papers (Kaufmann, Kraay and Zoido-Lobatón (1999a,b) and (2001), and Kaufmann, Kraay and Mastruzzi (2004, 2005, and 2006)). The latest round of these governance indicators reports on six dimensions of governance every two years since 1996, and annually between 2002 and 2005, for over 200 countries. For brevity we will refer to them here as the WGI. The WGI have in recent years become widely-used indicators by policymakers and academics.2 The data and accompanying descriptive papers, together with a Web-based interactive graphical tool, are available at www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/govdata. We address nine specific criticisms of the WGI that are made in three recen