Six dimensions of institutional quality across 188 countries, from 1996 to 2024. Hovering any country shows all six at once.
Source: Worldwide Governance Indicators, World Bank. Each indicator runs from roughly −2.5 to +2.5, with zero at the world average for the year. The scores are aggregates of perception data from around 35 survey and expert sources, so they measure assessed institutional quality rather than directly observed outcomes. Standard errors are substantial, and small differences between countries should not be treated as meaningful.
Government effectiveness — the quality of public services, the competence and independence of the civil service, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to its stated policies.
Regulatory quality — the ability to formulate and implement policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development.
Rule of law — confidence in and adherence to the rules of society: contract enforcement, property rights, the police and the courts.
Control of corruption — the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, and state capture by elites.
Voice and accountability — the extent to which citizens can participate in selecting their government, together with freedom of expression, association, and a free press.
Political stability — the likelihood of political instability or politically motivated violence, including terrorism.
These are perception measures, not observations. The scores aggregate around 35 underlying sources: household surveys, firm surveys, expert assessments and commercial risk ratings. They capture how governance is assessed by those respondents, which correlates with but is not identical to how institutions actually perform.
The scale is relative, not absolute. Zero is the world average for that year, not an objective standard. A country holding a constant score has kept pace with the world, not stood still.
Standard errors are substantial. The World Bank publishes confidence intervals alongside the point estimates, and they are wide enough that small differences between countries are not meaningful. Ranking two countries separated by 0.1 is not supportable.
The dimensions correlate strongly with each other and with income. A country scoring well on rule of law usually scores well on government effectiveness, and both track GDP per capita closely. That is partly real and partly an artefact of how perception data is generated: respondents assessing a wealthy country tend to assess it favourably across the board.
The 2025 release revised the methodology and recalculated the full series back to 1996, so figures may differ from earlier publications.
Environmental policy does not implement itself. A carbon price requires a tax authority capable of collecting it; an emissions standard requires an inspectorate capable of enforcing it; a certification scheme requires a regulator whose approval means something.
This is the finding that keeps recurring in my own work. In studies of green technology strategy in Morocco, regulatory measures ranked ahead of every technological and financial factor tested. In work on green growth, transparency and disclosure outranked technological intervention. The constraint on environmental progress in emerging economies is frequently institutional rather than technical.
These indicators are the closest available proxy for that institutional capacity, which is why they sit alongside the environmental data rather than apart from it.
My own work on governance and sustainability:
Data from the Worldwide Governance Indicators, World Bank.