The government effectiveness index is a ranking of
state capacity
State capacity is the ability of a government to accomplish policy goals, either generally or in reference to specific aims. More narrowly, state capacity often refers to the ability of a state to collect taxes, enforce law and order, and provide p ...
developed by the
World Bank Group
The World Bank Group (WBG) is a family of five international organizations that make leveraged loans to developing countries. It is the largest and best-known development bank in the world and an observer at the United Nations Development Group ...
. It measures the quality of public services, civil service, policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of a government's commitment to improving or maintaining these aspects. The index includes 193 countries, each scored from -2.5 (less effective) to 2.5 (more effective). It is part of a broader set of government quality indicators.
[Kaufmann, Daniel and Kraay, Aart]
"Growth Without Governance"
(November 2002). World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2928.
The World Bank releases the government effectiveness index as one of six worldwide governance indicators. The others are voice and accountability, political stability, regulatory quality, the rule of law, and control of corruption.
of the
Natural Resource Governance Institute and Aart Kraay of the World Bank Development Research Group produce these indexes.
They consider these six indexes as dimensions of governance.
Methodology
The government effectiveness index makes use of 47 variables. These variables span a range from the quality of bureaucracy to the infrastructure for the distribution of goods and services. They come from 32 different sources, including the
African Development Bank and the Global Insight Business Conditions and Risk Indicators. These variables undergo rescaling and are then combined using the
unobserved components model.
Significance
As an overall measure, the government effectiveness index doesn't provide the means to pinpoint specific issues within a country or to analyse particular solutions. However, it is useful for comparing countries in general, tracking a particular country's improvement, or discerning trends.
Government effectiveness strongly
correlates with
life satisfaction
Life satisfaction is an evaluation of a person's quality of life. It is assessed in terms of mood, relationship satisfaction, achieved goals, self-concepts, and the self-perceived ability to cope with life. Life satisfaction involves a favorabl ...
, GDP per capita, and education expenditure. According to Guisan,
[ it promotes development.
]
Relationship with the Effective Altruism Movement
The government effectiveness index has found relevance in the context of the Effective altruism movement. The Effective Altruism movement promotes using evidence and reason to determine the most effective ways to guide giving.[{{cite journal , last=MacAskill , first=William , date=January 2017 , title=Effective altruism: introduction , url=https://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/vol18/iss1/1 , url-status=live , journal=Essays in Philosophy , language=en , volume=18 , issue=1 , page=eP1580:1–5 , doi=10.7710/1526-0569.1580 , issn=1526-0569 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190807105816/https://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/vol18/iss1/1/ , archive-date=2019-08-07 , access-date=2024-02-08 , doi-access=free] In this context, the government effectiveness index provides a broad, data-driven measure of government functionality that can inform government decisions. By offering an evidence-based evaluation of government functionality, the index aligns with the movement's emphasis on rigorous, data-driven approaches to altruism.
See also
* Governance
Governance is the overall complex system or framework of Process, processes, functions, structures, Social norm, rules, Law, laws and Norms (sociology), norms born out of the Interpersonal relationship, relationships, Social interaction, intera ...
* World Governance Index
* Public Administration
Public administration, or public policy and administration refers to "the management of public programs", or the "translation of politics into the reality that citizens see every day",Kettl, Donald and James Fessler. 2009. ''The Politics of the ...
* World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and Grant (money), grants to the governments of Least developed countries, low- and Developing country, middle-income countries for the purposes of economic development ...
* Policy
Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an or ...
* Effective altruism
* Correlation
In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics ...
References
* Effective altruism
* World Bank
* Index numbers
* International rankings