The World Bank released its annual “governance indicators” yesterday – a set of six variables which is designed to measure governance globally.  The project has many critics, broadly falling into two camps – those that oppose the idea on principle and argue that the World Bank should not be in the business of rating countries on governance or any other metric, and those that find fault with the indicators methodology, which could accurately be described as a “kitchen sink” approach to measuring corruption, political stability and other categories of governance with surveys and other imprecise metrics.

Nonetheless, if one doesn’t take the indicators at face value as an absolute measurement of the complicated concept of governance and accepts, as should be done with most indicators of political variables, that they are most useful for understanding broad trends and comparisons between regions, then there is some interest in evaluating what they have to say about Latin America and other regions.

The six indicators measure voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption.  

There are some interesting trends (which indeed reveal some World Bank biases) in the numbers.  Venezuela, for example, ranks lowest on all metrics with the exception of political stability, in which Colombia is ranked just lower, and government effectiveness where two Central American states fall behind.   There is something a bit fishy about this: while Venezuela’s record on voice and accountability is surely one of the lowest in the region, it is unclear why it’s political stability rating is so low.  Chavez, if anything, seems to have nearly absolute and unchallenged control of the state, a hallmark of stability (if not the democratic type).   Additionally, on the metric of government effectiveness, Venezuela is ranked well below Honduras, Guatemala, Bolivia and Paraguay.  While I haven’t been to Caracas since last summer and therefore have little sense of the effectiveness of government at present, on most metrics such as tax collection and public spending, I would imagine that Venezuela still ranks above most of Central America and notoriously ill-governed countries like Paraguay.

Chile, in contrast, is top of the tables for the region in all metrics except political stability, where Costa Rica ranks just above.  In fact, Chile, along with Uruguay and Costa Rica score consistently around OECD averages.

It also shows where countries with otherwise “good governance” fall behind.  Brazil scores relatively well on most metrics, but is ranked lower on regulatory quality and control of corruption.  Mexico falls behind on voice and accountability and notably, political stability.  

The rankings are sure to rankle some governments (the FT reports that Argentina is upset with the fact that all but one of its indicators is on a downward trend) and upset some development specialists, it makes for an interesting reflection both on what the World Bank means by governance (a definition that is substantially different from that of political scientists) and to see where countries broadly fall.