Measuring the governance in Pakistan: An introduction to KU Index

The governance at the national level has commonly been measured as poor or good governance by researchers in the area of public sector reforms. They have rarely attempted the numeric estimation of the concept but used different socioeconomic indicators as proxies. Governance is a multidimensional concept that cannot be accurately elaborated by a single indicator. In the literature there exists a gap for gauging the governance in the form of an index. The current study has attempted to ameliorate different dimensions of governance by including forty two social, political, economic, demographic and environmental indicators. These indicators are firstly merged into thirteen sub-dimensions and then into five dimensions. The dimensions have been transformed in to governance index. The trend of the index shows that governance has not only progressed very slowly but it remained desperate in the study period. The contribution of this study is to provide governance index named KU index for Pakistan in annual time series for the years 1980-81 to 2010-2011. The index explained the level of governance in different eras and is ultimately connected with public sector reforms. It can be used by researchers as an explanatory factor for various political, socioeconomic and regional strategic phenomenon. Furthermore, the criterion of estimation of governance may be adopted for other economies and comparative analysis may be done.