Reproducibility Package for The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Revised Methodology For Measuring Governance Using Perception Data

The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) provide composite measures of six dimensions of governance—Voice and Accountability, Political Stability, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. The indicators draw on 35 data sources, including household and firm surveys and expert assessments from multilateral organizations, nongovernmental organizations, academic institutions, and commercial data providers. They cover over 200 economies annually from 1996 to 2024 and are publicly available on the WGI website.
This paper summarizes the data sources and aggregation methodology underlying the WGI and documents a set of changes introduced as part of the 2025 revision. The changes include a stricter protocol for screening data sources; the addition of new qualified sources; a closer alignment of indicators with an institutional-functions framework; targeted refinements to the mapping of indicators across the six governance dimensions; revisions to the aggregation model that allow the global average of governance to vary over time; and the introduction of an absolute 0–100 scale anchored by fixed benchmark countries. Taken together, these changes form the basis of the revised WGI. Historical estimates have been recalculated back to 1996 to maintain a fully consistent series.
Sensitivity analysis shows that the updated estimates are robust to reasonable variations in source inclusion, weighting choices, and source data imputation. The WGI continues to offer a coherent, comparable overview of governance patterns worldwide, while assessments of specific institutional reforms are more effectively supported by purpose-built, country-level governance diagnostics.