MANILA - The Philippines has regressed in key areas of governance over the past ten years, data from the World Bank showed.

The multilateral lender's Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), a research project initiated in the late 1990s, revealed that the country's performance worsened last year compared to 1998 in five out of six dimensions of governance.

These areas include voice and accountability (-0.20 from 0.39), political stability and absence of violence (-1.41 from -0.17), regulatory quality (-0.05 from 0.03), rule of law (-0.49 from -0.1), and control of corruption (-0.75 from -0.4).

Despite this, the government was perceived to be more effective over the last decade with a 0.3-percent rise.

"The good news is that some countries are recognizing and responding to governance challenges, and are showing strong improvements that reflect concerted efforts by political leaders, policymakers, civil society, and the private sector," said Aart Kraay, co-author of the report and lead economist in the World Bank's development research group.

Aside from the Philippines, a number of countries have also experienced deteriorations in several governance dimensions, which include Zimbabwe, Cote d'Ivoire, Belarus, Eritrea, and Venezuela.

On the other hand, the WGI showed several countries with substantial improvements in certain aspects of governance, which include Ghana, Niger, Peru, Algeria, Angola, Sierra Leone, China, Colombia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Georgia, Libya, Latvia, Liberia, Indonesia, and Serbia.

The WGI covered 212 countries and territories, drawing together hundreds of variables from 35 different data sources to capture the views of tens of thousands of survey respondents worldwide, as well as thousands of experts in the private, non-government, and public sectors.

Authors Aart Kraay, Daniel Kaufmann, and Massimo Mastruzzi defined governance as "the traditions and institutions by which authority in a country is exercised." This includes how governments are selected, monitored and replaced, the capacity of government to effectively formulate and implement sound policies, and the respect of citizens and the state for institutions that govern economic and social interactions among them.

The six dimensions of governance in the WGI were defined by the authors 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
• Political stability and absence of violence: the likelihood that the government will be destabilized by unconstitutional or violent means, including terrorism
• Government effectiveness: the quality of public services, the capacity of the civil service and its independence from political pressures
• Regulatory quality: the ability of the government to provide sound policies and regulations that enable and promote private sector development
• Rule of law: the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, including the quality of property rights, the police, and the courts, as well as the risk of crime
• Control of corruption: the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as elite "capture" of the state

Estrada and Arroyo

The WGI showed that governance in the Philippines worsened since 1998 (the start of President Joseph Estrada's term) until 2008 (the seventh year of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as Philippine President).

Estrada, who gained popularity as a film actor, was elected President in 1998, only to be ousted from power in 2001 through a second EDSA people power revolution over allegations of corruption. The Sandiganbayan eventually sentenced him to life imprisonment for plunder.

Arroyo, who was Vice President at the time of Estrada's ouster, was sworn into the Presidency by then Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr. before the EDSA II crowd.

Since then, Arroyo's term was muddled in controversies such as her alleged cheating in the 2004 Presidential elections, the NBN-ZTE broadband scandal, four impeachment complaints, three attempted military takeovers, and extra-judicial killings, among many others. She also received heavy criticism for granting executive clemency to Estrada in 2007.

Despite this, President Arroyo has managed to stay in power up to this day, and is set to end her term next year.

However, rumors had been circulating that she is eyeing a congressional seat in Pampanga in 2010, with her critics saying that this may be connected to charter change.