Critiques and Responses on World Governance Indicators

A new working paper from the World Bank, addresses some of the criticisms of its governance indicators;

Critique 1: Governance cannot be compared over time using the WGI since they are scaled to have the same global averages in every period

Critique 2: Governance cannot be compared across countries or over time with the WGI since the estimates for governance for different countries or periods may be based on different underlying data sources.

Critique 3: Changes over time in some of the individual indicators underlying the WGI aggregate indicators reflect corrections of past errors rather than actual changes.

Critique 4: The WGI are too imprecise to permit meaningful comparisons of governance over time or across countries

Critique 5: The individual indicators underlying the WGI are biased towards the views of business elites, and thus so are the aggregate indicators.

Critique 6: The data sources underlying the WGI are overly influenced by recent economic performance, and/or the level of development of a country -- rich, or fast-growing countries get better scores simply because they rich or growing fast.

Critique 7: The individual data sources underlying the WGI, particularly those from commercial risk rating agencies, make correlated errors in their assessments of governance, and thus are less informative about governance than they appear.

Critique 8: If some data sources make correlated errors, the aggregation procedure used by the WGI gives too much weight to such indicators.

Related;
On Measuring Governance: A Roundtable Discussion . Links to the discussion papers.
Aart Kraay on Measuring Governance (podcast)
Construct Validity
Are International Databases on Corruption Reliable? A Comparison of Expert Opinion Surveys and Household Surveys in Sub-Saharan Africa (in French)
Thomas, M.A. 2007. "What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?"
Thomas, M.A. 2004. "Factoring in Governance."
Uses and Abuses of Governance Indicators
General Readings on Corruption and Governance
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
An analysis of the causes of corruption in the judiciary
Comparative international study of court performance indicators : a descriptive and analytical account