Rule of Law 1998

Report year 1998·Data year 1998

Rule of Law estimate (−2.5 to 2.5)·Higher is better — rank 1 leads·Published by World Bank Group

24 editions (1996–2022), covering 196 to 200 countries. One of the six Worldwide Governance Indicators: how far people have confidence in and abide by the rules of society — contract enforcement, property rights, the police and the courts, and the likelihood of crime and violence. ⚠ NOT the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, which measures a similar subject and is NOT on this site: that publisher grants no commercial reuse, and its data was removed in 2026-08. This is the World Bank’s own measure, under the Bank’s own licence. ⚠ 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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