SINGAPORE, Sept. 15 (Xinhua) -- The World Bank released here on Friday a Worldwide Governance Indicators, the largest publicly available data resource on governance in the world.

    Based on a long-standing research program of the World Bank Institute and the Research Department of the World Bank, the indicators capture six key dimensions of the governance, including voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption .

    "The release of the indicators demonstrate that governance can be measured, that poor governance is not an exclusive challenge of the developing world," said Daniel Kaufmann, Director of Global Governance at the World Bank Institute, at a press conference held here.

    Policy makers and academics agree that good governance matters for economic development. Researchers estimate that when governance is improved by one standard deviation, incomes rise about three-fold in the long run, and infant mortality declines by two-thirds.

    But a dozen years ago, virtually no internationally comparable measures of governance or corruption existed. Since then, the world has seen an explosion of empirical research aimed at measuring governance, monitoring country progress, understanding the causes and consequences of good governance for development, and learning from successes and failures. Enditem