Browse Econ Literature
- Working papers
- Software components
- Book chapters
- JEL classification
More features
- Subscribe to new research
RePEc Biblio
Author registration.
- Economics Virtual Seminar Calendar NEW!
Governance matters
- Author & abstract
- 10 References
- 240 Citations
- Most related
- Related works & more
Corrections
- Kaufmann, Daniel
- Kraay, Aart
- Zoido-Lobaton, Pablo
- Daniel Kaufmann
Suggested Citation
Download full text from publisher, references listed on ideas.
Follow serials, authors, keywords & more
Public profiles for Economics researchers
Various research rankings in Economics
RePEc Genealogy
Who was a student of whom, using RePEc
Curated articles & papers on economics topics
Upload your paper to be listed on RePEc and IDEAS
New papers by email
Subscribe to new additions to RePEc
EconAcademics
Blog aggregator for economics research
Cases of plagiarism in Economics
About RePEc
Initiative for open bibliographies in Economics
News about RePEc
Questions about IDEAS and RePEc
RePEc volunteers
Participating archives
Publishers indexing in RePEc
Privacy statement
Found an error or omission?
Opportunities to help RePEc
Get papers listed
Have your research listed on RePEc
Open a RePEc archive
Have your institution's/publisher's output listed on RePEc
Governance Indicators: Where Are We, Where Should We Be Going?
Kaufmann, Daniel and Kraay, Aart (2008): Governance Indicators: Where Are We, Where Should We Be Going? Published in: World Bank Research Observer
Progress in measuring governance is assessed using a simple framework that distinguishes between indicators that measure formal rules and indicators that measure the practical application or outcomes of these rules. The analysis calls attention to the strengths and weaknesses of both types of indicators as well as the complementarities between them. It distinguishes between the views of experts and the results of surveys and assesses the merits of aggregate as opposed to individual governance indicators. Some simple principles are identified to guide the use and refinement of existing governance indicators and the development of future indicators. These include transparently disclosing diversity of indicators and exploiting complementarities among them, submitting all indicators to rigorous public and academic scrutiny, and being realistic in expectations of future indicators.
All papers reproduced by permission. Reproduction and distribution subject to the approval of the copyright owners.
Contact us: [email protected]
This repository has been built using EPrints software .
Revealed: the ten research papers that policy documents cite most
- Dalmeet Singh Chawla 0
Dalmeet Singh Chawla is a freelance science journalist based in London.
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar
Policymakers often work behind closed doors — but the documents they produce offer clues about the research that influences them. Credit: Stefan Rousseau/Getty
When David Autor co-wrote a paper on how computerization affects job skill demands more than 20 years ago, a journal took 18 months to consider it — only to reject it after review. He went on to submit it to The Quarterly Journal of Economics , which eventually published the work 1 in November 2003.
Autor’s paper is now the third most cited in policy documents worldwide, according to an analysis of data provided exclusively to Nature . It has accumulated around 1,100 citations in policy documents, show figures from the London-based firm Overton (see ‘The most-cited papers in policy’), which maintains a database of more than 12 million policy documents, think-tank papers, white papers and guidelines.
“I thought it was destined to be quite an obscure paper,” recalls Autor, a public-policy scholar and economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “I’m excited that a lot of people are citing it.”
The most-cited papers in policy
Economics papers dominate the top ten papers that policy documents reference most.
Data from Sage Policy Profiles as of 15 April 2024
The top ten most cited papers in policy documents are dominated by economics research. When economics studies are excluded, a 1997 Nature paper 2 about Earth’s ecosystem services and natural capital is second on the list, with more than 900 policy citations. The paper has also garnered more than 32,000 references from other studies, according to Google Scholar. Other highly cited non-economics studies include works on planetary boundaries, sustainable foods and the future of employment (see ‘Most-cited papers — excluding economics research’).
These lists provide insight into the types of research that politicians pay attention to, but policy citations don’t necessarily imply impact or influence, and Overton’s database has a bias towards documents published in English.
Interdisciplinary impact
Overton usually charges a licence fee to access its citation data. But last year, the firm worked with the London-based publisher Sage to release a free web-based tool that allows any researcher to find out how many times policy documents have cited their papers or mention their names. Overton and Sage said they created the tool, called Sage Policy Profiles, to help researchers to demonstrate the impact or influence their work might be having on policy. This can be useful for researchers during promotion or tenure interviews and in grant applications.
Autor thinks his study stands out because his paper was different from what other economists were writing at the time. It suggested that ‘middle-skill’ work, typically done in offices or factories by people who haven’t attended university, was going to be largely automated, leaving workers with either highly skilled jobs or manual work. “It has stood the test of time,” he says, “and it got people to focus on what I think is the right problem.” That topic is just as relevant today, Autor says, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence.
Most-cited papers — excluding economics research
When economics studies are excluded, the research papers that policy documents most commonly reference cover topics including climate change and nutrition.
Walter Willett, an epidemiologist and food scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, thinks that interdisciplinary teams are most likely to gain a lot of policy citations. He co-authored a paper on the list of most cited non-economics studies: a 2019 work 3 that was part of a Lancet commission to investigate how to feed the global population a healthy and environmentally sustainable diet by 2050 and has accumulated more than 600 policy citations.
“I think it had an impact because it was clearly a multidisciplinary effort,” says Willett. The work was co-authored by 37 scientists from 17 countries. The team included researchers from disciplines including food science, health metrics, climate change, ecology and evolution and bioethics. “None of us could have done this on our own. It really did require working with people outside our fields.”
Sverker Sörlin, an environmental historian at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, agrees that papers with a diverse set of authors often attract more policy citations. “It’s the combined effect that is often the key to getting more influence,” he says.
Has your research influenced policy? Use this free tool to check
Sörlin co-authored two papers in the list of top ten non-economics papers. One of those is a 2015 Science paper 4 on planetary boundaries — a concept defining the environmental limits in which humanity can develop and thrive — which has attracted more than 750 policy citations. Sörlin thinks one reason it has been popular is that it’s a sequel to a 2009 Nature paper 5 he co-authored on the same topic, which has been cited by policy documents 575 times.
Although policy citations don’t necessarily imply influence, Willett has seen evidence that his paper is prompting changes in policy. He points to Denmark as an example, noting that the nation is reformatting its dietary guidelines in line with the study’s recommendations. “I certainly can’t say that this document is the only thing that’s changing their guidelines,” he says. But “this gave it the support and credibility that allowed them to go forward”.
Broad brush
Peter Gluckman, who was the chief science adviser to the prime minister of New Zealand between 2009 and 2018, is not surprised by the lists. He expects policymakers to refer to broad-brush papers rather than those reporting on incremental advances in a field.
Gluckman, a paediatrician and biomedical scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, notes that it’s important to consider the context in which papers are being cited, because studies reporting controversial findings sometimes attract many citations. He also warns that the list is probably not comprehensive: many policy papers are not easily accessible to tools such as Overton, which uses text mining to compile data, and so will not be included in the database.
The top 100 papers
“The thing that worries me most is the age of the papers that are involved,” Gluckman says. “Does that tell us something about just the way the analysis is done or that relatively few papers get heavily used in policymaking?”
Gluckman says it’s strange that some recent work on climate change, food security, social cohesion and similar areas hasn’t made it to the non-economics list. “Maybe it’s just because they’re not being referred to,” he says, or perhaps that work is cited, in turn, in the broad-scope papers that are most heavily referenced in policy documents.
As for Sage Policy Profiles, Gluckman says it’s always useful to get an idea of which studies are attracting attention from policymakers, but he notes that studies often take years to influence policy. “Yet the average academic is trying to make a claim here and now that their current work is having an impact,” he adds. “So there’s a disconnect there.”
Willett thinks policy citations are probably more important than scholarly citations in other papers. “In the end, we don’t want this to just sit on an academic shelf.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00660-1
Autor, D. H., Levy, F. & Murnane, R. J. Q. J. Econ. 118 , 1279–1333 (2003).
Article Google Scholar
Costanza, R. et al. Nature 387 , 253–260 (1997).
Willett, W. et al. Lancet 393 , 447–492 (2019).
Article PubMed Google Scholar
Steffen, W. et al. Science 347 , 1259855 (2015).
Rockström, J. et al. Nature 461 , 472–475 (2009).
Download references
Reprints and permissions
Related Articles
We must protect the global plastics treaty from corporate interference
World View 17 APR 24
UN plastics treaty: don’t let lobbyists drown out researchers
Editorial 17 APR 24
Smoking bans are coming: what does the evidence say?
News 17 APR 24
CERN’s impact goes way beyond tiny particles
Spotlight 17 APR 24
The economic commitment of climate change
Article 17 APR 24
Last-mile delivery increases vaccine uptake in Sierra Leone
Article 13 MAR 24
Associate or Senior Editor, Nature Biomedical Engineering
Associate Editor or Senior Editor, Nature Biomedical Engineering Location: London, Shanghai and Madrid — Hybrid office and remote working Deadline:...
London (Central), London (Greater) (GB)
Springer Nature Ltd
FACULTY POSITION IN PATHOLOGY RESEARCH
Dallas, Texas (US)
The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UT Southwestern Medical Center)
Postdoc Fellow / Senior Scientist
The Yakoub and Sulzer labs at Harvard Medical School-Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Columbia University
Boston, Massachusetts (US)
Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital
Postdoc in Computational Genomics – Machine Learning for Multi-Omics Profiling of Cancer Evolution
Computational Postdoc - Artificial Intelligence in Oncology and Regulatory Genomics and Cancer Evolution at the DKFZ - limited to 2 years
Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg (DE)
German Cancer Research Center in the Helmholtz Association (DKFZ)
Computational Postdoc
The German Cancer Research Center is the largest biomedical research institution in Germany.
Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.
Quick links
- Explore articles by subject
- Guide to authors
- Editorial policies
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
Using an unobserved components methodology (described in the companion paper by Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobatón, Aggregating Governance Indicators, Policy Research Working Paper 2195), they then construct six aggregate indicators corresponding to six basic governance concepts: voice and accountability, political instability and violence ...
No 2196, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank. Abstract: In a cross-section of more than 150 countries, the authors provide new empirical evidence of a strong causal relationship from better governance to better development outcomes. They base their analysis on a new database containing more than 300 governance indicators ...
Using an unobserved components methodology (described in the companion paper by Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton, Aggregating Governance Indicators, Policy Research Working Paper 2195), they then construct six aggregate indicators corresponding to six basic governance concepts: voice and accountability, political instability and violence ...
Kaufmann, Daniel & Kraay, Aart & Zoido-Lobaton, Pablo, 1999. " Governance matters ," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2196, The World Bank. Downloadable! In a cross-section of more than 150 countries, the authors provide new empirical evidence of a strong causal relationship from better governance to better development outcomes.
They apply the methodology developed in Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton ("Aggregating Governance Indicators", Policy Research Working Paper 2195, and "Governance Matters", Policy Research Working Paper 2196, October 1999) to newly available data at governance indicators comparable with those constructed for 1997-98.
The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas abot development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentationts are less than fully polisbed. The papers carry the names of tbe authors and should be cited accordingly.
Title: Governance Matters Volume 2196 of Policy research working papers: Authors: Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay, Pablo Zoido-Lobatón: Contributors: World Bank. Development Research Group. Macroeconomics and Growth Division, World Bank Institute. Governance, Regulation, and Finance Division
Matters," Policy Research Working Paper 2196, October 1999) to newly available data to arrive at. governance indicators comparable with those. constructed for 1997/98. The data is presented in the
The authors construct aggregate governance indicators for six dimensions of governance, covering 175 countries in 2000-01. They apply the methodology developed in Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton ("Aggregating Governance Indicators", Policy Research Working Paper 2195, and"Governance Matters", Policy Research Working Paper 2196, October 1999) to newly available data at governance indicators ...
Using an unobserved components methodology (described in the companion paper by Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton, Aggregating Governance Indicators, Policy Research Working Paper 2195), they then construct six aggregate indicators corresponding to six basic governance concepts: voice and accountability, political instability and violence ...
Policy Research Working Paper 2196. World Bank, Washington, D.C. Kaufmann, Daniel, Aart Kraay, and Massimo Mastruzzi. 2004. "Governance Matters III: Governance Indicators for 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002" World Bank Economic Review 18(2):253-87. ... Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators for 1996-2006." Policy Research Working ...
World bank policy research working paper, 2009. 5152: 2009: Governance Matters, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 2196. D Kaufmann, A Kraay, P Zoido-Lobaton. October. Washington DC: The World Bank, 1999. 4549 * 1999: The worldwide governance indicators: Methodology and analytical issues1.
They apply the methodology developed in Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton ("Aggregating Governance Indicators," Policy Research Working Paper 2195, and "Governance Matters," Policy Research Working Paper 2196, October 1999) to newly available data to arrive at governance indicators comparable with those constructed for 1997-98. The data is ...
This paper presents the latest update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project. The indicators measure six dimensions of governance: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption.
The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobatón 1999a, b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.
Aggregating governance indicators. Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Pablo Zoido-Lobaton. No 2195, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank Abstract: In recent years the growing interest of academics and policymakers in governance has been reflected in the proliferation of cross-country indices measuring various aspects of governance.
The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobaton 1999a, b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.
The top ten most cited papers in policy documents are dominated by economics research. When economics studies are excluded, a 1997 Nature paper 2 about Earth's ecosystem services and natural ...