A recent study of governance indicators gave Sri Lanka a percentile rank of 57 for Controlling Corruption, which means it did better than 57 of the 212 countries and territories evaluated.
However, in Political Stability and Absence of Violence, only 6 percent of the countries did worse than Sri Lanka.
The World Bank recently released its governance report—Governance Matters 2008: Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) 1996-2007—which showed that many emerging economies were fast emerging to be on par with several developed nations.
According to the ranking format, it was found that Sri Lanka did better that 36 percent of the countries in Accountability and Voice and was ahead of 47 percent of the countries in Government Effectiveness.
In the Quality of Regulation, Sri Lanka did better than 51 percent of the countries while 56 percent of them did worse than Sri Lanka when it came to the Rule of Law. The island was ahead of 57 percent of the countries in Controlling Corruption.
Although useful in prompting public discussions on governance the World Bank said that discussions of governance based on empirical measures need to be realistic about the limits of existing data.
"In this respect it is important that users take seriously the margins of error reported in the WGI, which reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data," the Bank said in a statement.
In keeping with this principle the indicator has assigned percentile ranks to each country with a lower and upper limit with an understanding that there was a 90 percent chance that a country’s rank could be any where between these limits.
This is the seventh update of the index within a decade and it draws on 35 different data sources to capture the views of tens of thousands of survey respondents worldwide, as well as thousands of experts in the private, NGO, and public sectors.
"The WGI are used by policymakers and civil society groups worldwide as a tool to assess governance challenges and monitor reforms, and by scholars researching the causes and consequences of good governance."
The bank said that better governance helps in the fight against poverty and improves living standards.
"Research over the past decade shows that improved governance raises development, and not the other way around. When governance is improved by one standard deviation, infant mortality declines by two-thirds and incomes rise about three-fold in the long run. Such an improvement in governance is within reach, since it is a fraction of the difference between the worst and best performers."
Good governance has also been found to significantly enhance the effectiveness of development assistance in general, particularly of World Bank-funded projects, the bank noted.
"Until the mid-nineties, I did not think that governance could be measured. The Worldwide Governance Indicators have shown me otherwise," says Shlomo Yitzhaki, Director of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics and Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University as quoted by the World Bank.
