Regulatory Quality 1996

Report year 1996·Data year 1996

Regulatory Quality (−2.5 to 2.5)·Higher is better — rank 1 leads·Published by World Bank Group

24 reference years (1996–2022), covering 181 to 200 countries, as published by the World Bank in the Worldwide Governance Indicators. The dimension captures how far a government is seen to formulate and enforce rules that let a private sector work — licensing, price controls, barriers to trade and entry, and the burden of regulation generally. ⚠ IT MEASURES THE QUALITY OF REGULATION AS PERCEIVED, NOT THE QUANTITY. A country can score well with a great deal of regulation, if that regulation is seen to work; this is not an index of deregulation. ⚠ It is built from surveys of firms, households and expert assessments, so it reports PERCEPTIONS rather than an audit of the statute book. ⚠ THE WORLD BANK PUBLISHES NO COMPOSITE WGI SCORE AND RANKS NOBODY. The Bank's own "Rank" column is a PERCENTILE (0 = worst governed, 100 = best), not an ordinal place, and is stored as `percentile_rank`; the POSITION on the statistics page is derived here by ordering the score and labelled as ours. ⚠ The same numbers also appear as a column of `government-effectiveness`, by construction — both are read from the same sheet in the same pass, so they cannot drift. ⚠ Promoted to an indicator on 2026-09-10; it had been carried as a column only since 2026-09-07.

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