This paper presents the latest update of our estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 209 countries and territories for five time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 different organizations. We assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance, and use an unobserved component model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. We present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of error for each country for the four periods. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, we provide examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure.
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