Guyana in lower rung of Worldwide Governance Indicators

http://www.stabroeknews.com/index.pl/article?id=56525623

Guyana in lower rung of Worldwide Governance Indicators
Stabroek News,
Sunday, July 29th 2007

The rule of law, political stability, control of corruption and
regulatory quality in Guyana continue to be areas of concern to
international study groups and think tanks and the release of the World
Governance Indicators is indicative of this.
Guyana scored reasonably in only two of those indicators: Voice and
Accountability where it achieved a mark of 50.5 per cent and Government
Effectiveness where the country scored 51.7 per cent.
But in the other indicators, Guyana scored poorly, achieving a mark of 26.9
per cent in Political Stability and Absence of Violence, 27.6 per cent in
Rule of Law, 32.0 per cent in Control of Corruption and 32.2 per cent in
Regulatory Quality.
The Worldwide Gover-nance Indicators (WGI) measured improvement in
governance and fighting corruption over the last decade.
The ten-year study by the World Bank Institute (WBI) and the World Bank
Deve-lopment Economics Vice-presidency involved over 200 countries and was
published on July 10.
Jamaica's lowest score was 33.3 per cent for Rule of Law. That country also
achieved a score of 36.1 per cent for Political Stability and Absence of
Violence; 44.2 per cent for Control of Corrup-tion; 58.5 per cent in
Regulatory Quality; 59.7 per cent for Government Effec-tiveness; and 63.9
per cent in Voice and Accountability.
Barbados scored above 83 per cent in all indicators except Regulatory
Quality where it scored 76.6 per cent. Trinidad had average scores though
they were better that those of Guyana. For Voice and Accountability, it
scored 62 per cent; Political Stability and Absence of Violence, 41.3 per
cent; Government Effec-tiveness, 63.5 per cent; Regulatory Quality, 71.2 per
cent; Rule of Law, 48.1 per cent and Control of Corrup-tion, 54.9 per cent.
Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland had the highest scores with
numbers within the 90th to 100th percentile.
The indicators measure voice and accountability, political stability and
absence of major violence and terror, government effectiveness, regulatory
quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. The study emphasises that
the indicators do not constitute a precise international ranking of
countries.
The release said the WBI research had shown the importance of good
governance for aid effectiveness in general, and for the success or failure
of World Bank projects in particular. "The full WGI volume, called
'Governance Matters VI,' shows how the six aggregate indicators are
constructed."
It said they are based on 33 individual data sources and hundreds of
variables, capturing the views on governance of tens of thousands of
household and firm survey respondents, as well as hundreds of non-government
organisations and public sector experts, and commercial business information
providers worldwide.
The WGI do not have an official World Bank ranking and do not necessarily
reflect the official views of the bank; they are also not used to allocate
Bank resourc-es across countries. "This is the job of the Country Policy and
Institutional Assessments for IDA [International Develop-ment Association, a
part of the World Bank] countries, as long mandated by the IDA deputies,"
Co-author of the study Aart Kraay, said. The third co-author of the study is
Massimo Mastruzzi.
The WGI have provoked debate and discussions about their strengths as well
as limitations for monitoring country governance, and for informing specific
country reform strategies.
The authors emphasise that the aggregate WGI data are just the starting
point for identifying the country's governance strengths, vulnerabilities
and broad trends, and for thinking about governance in specific country
contexts.