Response to 'what do the worldwide governance indicators measure?'

Abstract

Thomas (2009) dismisses the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) as an elaborate and unsupported hypothesis because of the failure to demonstrate the construct validity of these indicators. We argue that construct validity is not a useful tool to assess the merits of the WGI, and even if it were, Thomas provides no evidence of any practical consequences of failure to meet the criteria of construct validity. © 2010 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.