A Comparative Classification and Assessment of Governance Indices

For decades, academic scholars and multinational organisations have been assessing how ready governments are to meet the various political and socioeconomic challenges they face. These benchmarks of good governance have led to the creation of well-known composite indices such as the Human Development Index and the Rule of Law Index. Today, there are dozens of different governance indices, but few attempts have been made to properly classify them. We still know surprisingly little about what different kinds of indicators the indices contain and how much impact they have had. This chapter introduces and classifies thirty-seven governance indices and analyses their impact on academic research, the news media, and policy-making. The results provide new insights for the comparative analysis of composite indices and offer a useful resource for index creators.

Business · Composite index · Composite indicator · Corporate governance · Econometrics · Economics · Face (sociological concept) · Index (typography) · Management · Multinational corporation · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Accounting · Computer Science · Corruption and Economic Development · International Development and Aid · Law · Local Government Finance and Decentralization