ABSTRACT
The World Governance Indicators published by the World Bank are one of the best-known options for sourcing secondary data for cross-societal comparisons to explain economic development and economic growth. The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Reports provide a similar function in terms of benchmarking and comparing economies. Both aggregate a lot of data to form indicators and aspects of the whole phenomena they address. Together they provide a convenient source of data about governance and economies. Moreover, there is some evidence that governments who rank highly on the indicator of government effectiveness tend to do better in terms of competitiveness ranking. Both the World Governance Indicators and the Global Competitiveness rankings are no doubt vulnerable to critique in terms of their construction and use. There are additional problems when the World Governance Indicators are aggregated using an equal weighting to provide a measure of the institutions of public governance (Pinar 2015). But there is no doubting that both sets of data meet an increasing need for more data to do national benchmarking.
