Global panel data on World governance and state fragility from 2006 to 2022

This global panel dataset contains information collected from two different sources (The Fund for Peace and World Bank), on the governance and stability levels of 178 countries between 2006 and 2022. The dataset includes information on 1) Cohesion (security apparatus (C1), factionalized elites (C2), and group grievance (C3)), 2) Economic (economy (E1), economic inequality (E2), and human flight and brain drain (E3)), 3) Political (state legitimacy (P1), public services (P2), and human rights (P3)) indicators, 4) Social and cross-cutting (demographic pressures (S1), refugees and internally displaced persons (S2), and external intervention (X1)), and 5) Governance (voice and accountability (G1), political stability and absence of violence/terrorism (G2), government effectiveness (G3), regulatory quality (G4), rule of law (G5), and control of corruption (G6)). Data analysis was carried out using SPSS version 29 software to ensure a complete description of the data (labels, type and measure of variables, and uniformity of decimals), as well as the imputation possibility of missing data, which will allow future researchers to study both cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between the five types of indicators and the eighteen indicators reported.


a b s t r a c t
This global panel dataset contains information collected from two different sources (The Fund for Peace and World Bank), on the governance and stability levels of 178 countries between 2006 and 2022.The dataset includes information on 1) Cohesion (security apparatus (C1), factionalized elites (C2), and group grievance (C3)), 2) Economic (economy (E1), economic inequality (E2), and human flight and brain drain (E3)), 3) Political (state legitimacy (P1), public services (P2), and human rights (P3)) indicators, 4) Social and cross-cutting (demographic pressures (S1), refugees and internally displaced persons (S2), and external intervention (X1)), and 5) Governance (voice and accountability (G1), political stability and absence of violence/terrorism (G2), government effectiveness (G3), regulatory quality (G4), rule of law (G5), and control of corruption (G6)).Data analysis was carried out using SPSS version 29 software to ensure a complete description of the data (labels, type and measure of variables, and uniformity of decimals), as well as the imputation possibility of missing data, which will allow future researchers to study both cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between the five types of indicators and the eighteen indicators reported. ©

Value of the Data
• This dataset brings together a unique set of variables, useful for studying the relationships between the diverse elements that make up state fragility/stability and state governance issues.• Panel data can be used in cross-sectional and longitudinal time slices to validate and/or extend theories that relate political, economic, and social issues in global society, with an emphasis on state governance and state fragility.• Social science researchers, especially political scientists, economists and sociologists, and policy makers can benefit from the joint use of both datasets, significantly correlated, and commonly presented in a segregated form, both country and area studies.• Business decision makers can find value in this dataset, with information that provides a global overview for their international investment decisions.

Background
This dataset brings together two related topics.On the one hand, State Fragility, an important issue for international development [3] , identifies a country with weak state capacity and/or weak state legitimacy [4] , which is unable to provide basic functions to a large part of its population [5] , as a result of inadequate functioning in aspects of politics, public administration and security as a consequence of poverty, underdevelopment or civil war [6] , and which leaves citizens vulnerable to a whole series of disturbances [4] .
On the other hand, State Governance manifests itself in a democratic country, encouraging the participation of citizens and businesses in public management [7] .Since democracies establish state governance mechanisms that delimit the political and legal responsibilities of the highest authorities of the country [8] .Considering the effectiveness of state management as a fundamental element to address the challenges and dangers generated by the industrial society [9] .Thus, good governance ensures internal order, prevents social chaos, and avoids the spread of negative effects to other countries [10] .
When both topics are studied together, both sets of variables are not considered in an integrated manner.There may be studies of State Fragility with a dataset of Fragile States Index indicators [11][12][13] ), and Governance Studies with data from the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators [14 , 15] .Thus, the union of both primary datasets [1 , 2] , allows to advance in studies covering new theoretical aspects, given the high correlations between all the variables in the resulting secondary database (see Table 3 ).
The Fragile States Index indicators reported by [16] and [17] were obtained from The Fund for Peace.In the case of the State Governance indicators, the data were collected from the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) used by [18] and [19] .Both datasets are significantly correlated (see Table 3 ) but are scarcely studied together [20] and [21] .The details and sources of the variables are given in Table 1 .

Experimental Design, Materials and Methods
Data extraction and curation used the following protocol: 1) The data extracted from FSI were presented in 17 annual Excel workbooks (2006-2022) reporting the 12 indicators under study.2) Some records of 49 countries in the FSI databases had a blank space, which resulted in duplicate labels for these 49 countries.3) Additionally, 7 countries had different names in different years of FSI, these were homologated as: Israel, Cape Verde, Cote d'Ivoire, Czech Republic, Kyrgyz Republic, North Macedonia, and Slovak Republic.4) On the other hand, the data extracted from WGI were presented in a single Excel workbook, with the 6 indicators (variables) of interest distributed on separate spreadsheets in this workbook.5) In the case of these 15 countries, the names presented in both bases were homologated as: Bahamas, Congo Democratic Republic, Congo Republic, Congo Republic, Egypt, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Iran, Laos, Micronesia, Russia, Sao Tome and Principe, Syria, Turkey, Venezuela, and Yemen.In the case of both Koreas, North Korea and South Korea were chosen.6) For homogenization of the base in variables by columns, the annual estimation data from the WGI indicators were selected by transposing from rows to communes 1068 subsets of 17 data to complete 18,156 WGI indicator data.Storing a total of 3026 records (54,468 data) in an SPSS version 29 file adding the label metadata.
Table 2 shows the statistics describing the 18 indicators with 3026 records reported in this Global dataset, the variations in sample size (N) are due in the case of the FSI indicators to the countries not reported in the first edition (2006) and the differences for the WGI indicators to the South Sudan data starting from 2011 given the recent constitution at that date of this new country.Table 3 shows the bivariate correlations, all significant, between the indicators/variables from both sources (FSI [1] and the WGI [2] ), indicating the importance of jointly studying state fragility and state governance.Signif.(bilater.)0.0 0 0 0.0 0 0 .00 0 .00 0 .00 0 .00 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0 0 0.0 0 0 .00 0 .00 0 N

Limitations
Limitations to the reported data set are given by the lowest year reported for the FSI indicators (2006) and the latest year reported to date for the WGI indicators (2022), this limitation can be improved over time by updating the dataset using the extraction and curation protocol that we have detailed in 6 steps.Additionally, for the WGI indicators, only the estimated data has been considered, excluding the standard error, number of data sources, percentile rank, lower bound (90% confidence interval), and upper bound (90% confidence interval), to make both databases homogeneous.

Fig. 1
Fig. 1 shows in a box-and-whisker plot (boxplot) the quantitative distribution of the data for the 18 indicators reported, facilitating the comparison between the variables, highlighting their minimum and maximum values at the ends of the whiskers, the median indicated inside the box and the outliers presented by the G2 (lower) and G3 (upper) indicators.It is necessary to point out that the low values in the FSI indicators are better than the high values, and on the contrary for the WGI indicators the low values (negative) are worse than the high values (positive).Table3shows the bivariate correlations, all significant, between the indicators/variables from both sources (FSI [1] and the WGI[2] ), indicating the importance of jointly studying state fragility and state governance.
correl.−.717 * * −776 * * −.602 * * −.551 * * −.584 * * −.462 * * −.865 * * −.625 * * −.903 * * −.625 * * −.584 * * −.575 * * 2024The Authors.Published by Elsevier Inc.This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ) These data were collected from The Fund for Peace and World Bank for 178 countries between 2006 and 2022.The data analysis has reflected the blanks for some variables and years, so SPSS software was used to allow imputation of the missing data in the subsequent use of this global data panel.The file is also available in csv format.

Table 1
Description of the variables in (DATa_Global_Governance_and_Fragility_0622).
Inequality within the economy, regardless of the actual economic performance, such as structural inequality based on group (racial, ethnic, religious, or other identity group) or based on education, economic status, or region (urban-rural divide).FSI [1]0.5 (Lowest)( continued on next page )

Table 1 (
continued ) [2]ception of the public power exercise for private benefit, including forms of small and large-scale corruption, as well as the "capture" of the state by elites and private interests.WGI[2]2.5(Highest)

Table 3
Bivariate correlations WGI and FSI indicators.