Rule of law
estimate, roughly −2.5 to +2.5
- Published value. Native scale: standard-normal units, roughly −2.5 (worst) to +2.5 (best), world mean 0.
- Transform: value (no transform).
- Goalposts (fixed for all years; 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles of all observed country-years): worst = -1.71 scores 0, best = 1.84 scores 100.
- Direction: higher is better, no flip.
- Clip and scale: anything below the worst goalpost scores 0 and anything above the best scores 100; multiply by 100.
Where the numbers come from
- Worldwide Governance Indicators (World Bank), 2025 revision produces the series — Aggregates about 30 underlying data sources (household and firm surveys, NGO assessments, commercial risk raters, public-sector bodies) into one estimate per country-year with an unobserved-components model; the site shows which sources enter each country's estimate.
Source statement as published by the data provider (verbatim)
The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Revised Methodology for Measuring Governance Using Perception Data., World Bank Group (WBG), uri: https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators, note: Detailed documentation of the WGI, interactive tools for exploring the data, and full access to the underlying source data available at www.govindicators.org. Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2025 Revision, World Bank (www.govindicators.org), Accessed on 12/15/2025. And: World Bank (2025). “The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Revised Methodology for Measuring Governance Using Perception Data.” Washington, DC: World Bank Group. The 2025 revision builds upon the original WGI methodology which was introduced in 1999 and summarized by the following paper: Kaufmann, Daniel & Aart C. Kraay. (2024). “The Worldwide Governance Indicators: Methodology and 2024 Update.” Policy Research Working Paper. Washington, DC: World Bank Group., date accessed: 2026-06-03, date published: 2025
Rule of Law (RL) captures perceptions of the extent to which agents respect and follow the rules of society, including contract enforcement, property rights, the police, courts, and the likelihood of crime and violence. Governance estimate from the aggregation model, in units of a standard normal distribution, i.e. ranging from approximately -2.5 to 2.5. Larger values correspond to better governance. The (country-series-time) metadata include the (a) number of sources, and (b) standard error. The number of sources indicates the number of underlying data sources on which the governance estimate is based. The standard error indicates the precision of the governance estimate. Larger values indicate less precise estimates. A 90% confidence interval for the governance estimate is given by the estimate +/- 1.64 times the standard error.
Every country row below has a “verify” link to this series filtered to that country, so each value can be checked against the source.
History
Countries ranked on this indicator
206 countries have a usable value for 2024 (0 carried forward from an earlier year); 11 have none within 2 years.
No official value for 2024: 11 countries
Andorra, Channel Islands, Curacao, Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, Isle of Man, St. Martin (French part), Northern Mariana Islands, Sint Maarten (Dutch part), Turks and Caicos Islands, British Virgin Islands