Political Stability and Absence of Violence 2009

Report year 2009·Data year 2009

Political Stability estimate (−2.5 to 2.5)·Higher is better — rank 1 leads·Published by World Bank Group

24 editions (1996–2022), covering 185 to 200 countries. One of the six Worldwide Governance Indicators: how likely it is that a government will be brought down by unconstitutional or violent means, including politically motivated violence and terrorism. ⚠ A HIGHER score means MORE stable — the dimension is named for the good end, unlike most measures of violence, so a country at −3.31 (Iraq in 2004, the lowest reading in the whole series) is the least stable rather than the most. It is here because Peace & Security and Risk & Resilience were among the thinnest subjects on the site, and this is the only measure of either with 200-country coverage back to 1996. ⚠ THE “PERCENTILE RANK” COLUMN IS NOT A LEAGUE POSITION. It is a place on a 0–100 scale, so 97 means “above 97% of countries”, not “97th”. The Bank orders nobody 1, 2, 3, so no `global_rank` is stored; the POSITION shown on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score, and labelled as ours. ⚠ The estimate is a z-score: the world average is 0 by construction every year, which means a country can improve in absolute terms and still fall, and the scale cannot tell you whether the world as a whole got better. ⚠ The same figures also appear as a column of the `government-effectiveness` table, which is where all six WGI dimensions can be read side by side. They agree by construction — one importer reads one workbook in one pass. ⚠ Left out of the Country Index deliberately: loading several dimensions of one publisher’s work into a composite would weight governance over and over.

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