Human Development Report 2016

BOX 3.5
Voice and accountability indicator—the World Bank’s approach
The voice and accountability indicator is one of six aggregate
governance indicators constructed by the World Bank
to capture the dimensions of governance in a country—
voice and accountability, political stability and absence
of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality,
rule of law and control of corruption. Each indicator is
based on information from several data sources, ranging
from household and firm surveys to the subjective assessments
of multilateral organizations, nongovernmental
organizations and providers of commercial business information.
The voice and accountability indicator aggregates
data from surveys to capture perceptions of “the extent to
which a country’s citizens are able to participate in selecting
their government, as well as freedom of expression,
freedom of association and a free media.” 1
The individual variables from the various data sources
are rescaled to run from zero to one, with higher values indicating
better outcomes, and the rescaled values are then
used to construct estimates of voice and accountability.
Estimates are available for 214 countries and territories
from 1996 to 2015 in units of a standard normal distribution
ranging from approximately –2.5 to 2.5. Updated annually,
the indicator was first used by the Human Development
Report Office in the 2002 Human Development Report. 2
Notes
1. World Bank 2007, p. 262. 2. UNDP 2002.
Source: Human Development Report Office.
FIGURE 3.3
It is possible for a country to have a high Human Development Index value and a low score on the voice
and accountability index
Human Development Index, 2015
1.0
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
–2.0 –1.0 0
Voice and accountability, 2015
Arab States
East Asia & the Pacific
Europe and Central Asia
Latin America & the Caribbean
OECD
South Asia
Sub-Saharan Africa
1.0 2.0
One dimension
that lends itself to
measurement is
women’s participation
in national political life
and decisionmaking
Source: The World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators website (www.govindicators.org); Human Development Report Office.
dimensions. One dimension that lends itself
to measurement is women’s participation in
national political life and decisionmaking,
which is measured using women’s share of seats
in the national parliament. (This indicator is
included in the Gender Inequality Index.) By
shedding light on a key dimension of women’s
agency, this indicator complements the HDI
and provides a more complete picture of a
nation’s progress.
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