Indicatorii globali ai guvernanţei – considerente metodologice

Abstract

Starting in the eighties, the relationship between foreign aid effciency and institutional quality beca-me of interest, and a series of governance quality indicators have been developed and measured for a growing number of countries. World Governance Indicators are designed to aggregate data regarding governance provided by a large number of sources covering various countries into six dimensions – Voice and Accountability, Po-litical Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law and Control of Corruption. These governance indicators kept alive the interest for governance and, in certain cases, provided incentives for reforms in countries willing to improve their scores. After describing the methodology used by Ka-ufmann and his collaborators in their researches, we approach the main critiques and limitations of governance indicators – they cannot be used for policies’ assessment, comparisons of countries and over time are highly problematic, content validity is questionable and there is a certain lack of trans-parency regarding data sources and aggregation. Nowadays, there is a real need for a new genera-tion of governance indicators, more specifc, more meaningful and actionable based on facts more than perceptions and with a higher regard for operatio-nalization.