THE World Bank report finding that governance in the Philippines has worsened in the last 10 years validates the Filipinos’ perception of “misrule” by the Arroyo administration, Senate President Pro Tempore Jinggoy Estrada said on Wednesday.

Estrada, who cochairs the joint Congressional Oversight Committee on Labor and Employment, cited the recently released World Bank’s 1998-2008 comparative Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) report, which revealed that Philippines performance “deeply worsened” in five out of six major dimensions of governance.

Governance was generally defined in the WGI report as “the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised,” while the six dimensions of governance were explained as follows:

Voice and accountability. The extent to which a country’s citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, association and the press (the Philippines scored negative 0.20 in 2008 from 0.39 in 1998 in this dimension);

Political stability and absence of violence. On the likelihood that the government will be destabilized by unconstitutional or violent means (negative 1.41 from negative 0.17);

Regulatory quality. The ability of the government to provide sound policies and regulations that enable and promote private-sector development (negative 0.05 from 0.03);

Rule of law, or the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society (negative 0.49 from negative 0.1); and,

Control of corruption, or the prevention of the use of public power for private gain (where the Philippines scored negative 0.75 in 2008 from negative 0.4 in 1998).

“Clearly, the most effective measures in governance as shown in the 10-year scope of the World Bank report were undertaken by the Philippine government in 1998, or during the first year of President Joseph Estrada’s term,” the senator pointed out.

But, he added, “those governance measures initiated then by my father were discontinued by the Arroyo administration and we have thus, since then, been witnesses to issues of large-scale corruption and scandals of historic proportions, such as the ‘Hello, Garci’ election cheating and manipulation issue; the fertilizer-fund scam; the NBN-ZTE deal controversy; wanton violation of the Constitution and other laws of the land; and, so many others.”

The WGI covered 212 countries and territories, utilizing hundreds of variables from 35 different data sources to capture the views of tens of thousands of survey respondents from private, nongovernment and public sectors around the world.