The Economist quotes CGD senior fellow Steve Radelet and cites senior fellow Arvind Subramanian research on measuring governance in developing countries.
From the article:
"There have been huge improvements in monitoring and measuring the rule of law, even though people cannot agree exactly what it is. 'Fifteen years ago, we didn't talk about this stuff,' says Steve Radelet of the Centre for Global Development, a Washington think-tank. 'Ten years ago, there was no data.' Now, the Worldwide Governance Indicators project—'one of the best kept secrets at the World Bank', believes Gordon Johnson, a grand old man of aid-giving—is the state of the art. It gathers data on more than 60 indicators (the extent of crime, the quality of police, judicial independence and so on) to create rule-of-law and governance measures for virtually every country in the world. Aggregating like this (and being honest about the margin of error), says Mr Kaufmann, is far from perfect, but is a decent approximation."