POLITICAL instability and violence as well as the lack of accountability in the Philippines worsened in 2008, according to the latest World Governance Indicators (WGI) report released by the World Bank on Monday.

The “Governance Matters VIII: Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996-2008” report was authored by Daniel Kaufmann of Brookings Institution and Aart Kraay and Massimo Mastruzzi of The World Bank.

It measured how countries fared in the six dimensions of governance, voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption.

The higher the score received by a country for an indicator, the better off it is. Further, a percentile ranking of 100 is the highest while a percentile ranking of 0 is the lowest. In 2008, depending on the governance component, the indicators cover between 208 and 212 countries.

Burma appears to have been left out for obvious reasons, being ruled with a steel gauntlet by a military dictatorship.

For voice and accountability, the Philippines received a percentile ranking of 41 with score of -0.2 which was worse than the -0.16 score it received in 2007; and for political stability and absence of violence, a percentile ranking of 11 with a score of -1.41, worse than the -1.31 posted in 2007.

This indicator is about perceptions of the extent citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, the quality of their freedom of expression and freedom of association, and a free media. With a ranking of 41, the Philippines is well below average.

While the Philippines as will be shown below may have shown a modicum of progress in some indicators, compared to its Asean neighbors, it continues to fall behind and, compared to Singapore, very much behind because the city state posted a percentile ranking of 100 for three indicators—government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and control of corruption.

Government effectiveness shows perceptions of the quality of public services and efficiency of public employees as well as the degree of its independence from political pressures; also the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of government commitment to these policies.

Again the Philippines has an unsatisfactory rating. It placed at a percentile ranking of 55 and a score of zero, although it is better than the -0.04 score posted in 2007; while in regulatory quality, its ranking was 52 with a score of -0.05, better than the -0.13 score in 2007.

For the indicator of regulatory quality, the bank said it aimed to capture perceptions of the ability of the government to formulate and implement sound policies and regulations that permit and promote private sector development.

The rule of law indicator shows confidence in, and acceptance, of the rules of society, quality of contract enforcement, property rights, police authority, and the jurisdiction of the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence.                       

Here, the Philippines is ranked 40 with a score of -0.49, better than the -0.54 percent it received in 2007 in rule of law while in control of corruption, it has a percentile ranking of 26 with a score of -0.75, better than the 2007 score of -0.79.

The indicator control of corruption aimed to capture perceptions of the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as “capture” of the state by elites and private interests.