This paper describes a new database containing over 300 governance indicators compiled from a variety of sources. The paper provides a detailed description of each of these indicators and sources, and constructs six aggregate indicators corresponding to six basic governance concepts.

This paper explains how a simple variant of an unobserved components model can be used to combine the information from these different sources into aggregate governance indicators. The main advantage of this method is that it allows us to quantify the precision of the both individual sources of governance data as well as the aggregate governance indicators. The paper illustrates the methodology by constructing aggregate indicators of bureaucratic quality, rule of law, and graft for a large sample of 160 countries. Although these aggregate governance indicators are more informative about the level of governance than any individual indicator, the standard errors associated with estimates of governance are still large relative to the units in which governance is measured.

Introducing a working framework Conceptual design Empirical tools Implementation process Sampling and Field work Analysis and use of the data