Rule of Law

A strong rule of law helps ensure fair competition in a market-based system and it protects the incentives and efficiency of this system. When a country's legal system can reliably and efficiently enforce agreements that businesses make and protect people's property and investments, the economy can function. If there are strong disagreements, a contract broken, or a bankruptcy, a well-developed legal system makes working these things out fair and orderly. When the government fails to do these things, investing and doing business in a country is a lot riskier and inefficient. A strong rule of law also helps stamp out corruption and other activities that discourage profit seeking and prevent the most highly valued products and businesses from thriving.

强有力的法治有助于确保市场体系的公平竞争，保护这一制度的激励和效率。当一个国家的法律制度可以可靠，高效地执行企业制定和保护人民财产和投资的协议时，经济就可以发挥作用。如果存在强烈的分歧，合同破产或破产，法律制度完善，使这些事情公平有序。当政府不做这些事情时，在一个国家进行投资和经营是一个风险很大，效率低下的问题。强有力的法治也有利于遏制牟利追求的贪污腐败和其他活动，防止最高价值的产品和企业蓬勃发展。

We measure rule of law by combining measures related to the efficiency of the legal framework in settling disputes (WEF), property rights (WEF), protecting investors (World Bank/IFC), and enforcing contracts (World Bank/IFC). The pieces of our rule of law indicator are shown in the table below. As with our measures of corruption and bureaucracy, the rule of law tends to be strongly related to a country's income. Again, we won't delve into all the reasons here, but it's intuitive that countries that have less resources and less educated populations have more immature legal systems, and the rule of law is likely compounded by interrelated factors, like higher corruption. Here we want to look at the rule of law of a country taking into account its development stage. That gives us a better sense of the underlying cultural elements that will determine its lawfulness as it develops. It's also a more helpful perspective in looking at future growth. As with our measures of bureaucracy and corruption, we would expect that businessmen and investors will likely expect there to be lower rule of law in poorer countries, and so it may not impact their decision to do business or invest in an emerging country that is otherwise competitive. But if the rule of law is particularly weak in that country relative to others of similar income, that is likely a drag. Indeed, we see no relationship between the rule of law on its own and future growth. But once we exclude the effect of income, our gauge of the rule of law is 57% correlated to historical future growth in income per capita. In other words, when countries still fail to uphold the rule of law once they are rich, their cultures often appear to be holding back their growth. Along with our measures of bureaucracy and corruption, this gauge helps us triangulate the picture of how hard it is to do business in a country.

通过与解决争端（WEF），产权（WEF），保护投资者（世行/国际金融公司）和执行合同（世行/国际金融公司）的法律框架效率相关的措施来衡量法治。我们的法治指标如下表所示。与我们的腐败和官僚主义措施一样，法治倾向于与一国的收入密切相关。再次，我们不会深入了解所有这些原因，但直观的是，资源较少，受教育程度较低的国家的法律制度更加不成熟，法治可能会加剧相关因素，如腐败程度较高。在这里，我们要考虑到一个国家的发展阶段的法治。这使我们能够更好地了解当前发展的决定其合法性的潜在文化因素。这也是对未来增长的更有帮助的观点。与我们的官僚和腐败措施一样，我们期望商人和投资者可能期望在较贫穷的国家有较低的法治，因此它可能不会影响他们做出生意或投资于其他新兴国家的决定竞争的。但是，如果该国相对于其他类似收入的法治特别薄弱，这可能是拖累的。事实上，我们看到法治本身和未来的增长之间没有任何关系。但一旦排除了收入的影响，我们对法治的衡量与人均收入的未来增长率呈57％的相关性。换句话说，一旦国家富有国家仍然不能维护法治，他们的文化往往似乎阻碍了他们的成长。随着我们的官僚主义和腐败的措施，这个指标有助于我们对在一个国家做生意的难度进行三角测量。

Before taking into account income levels, Singapore, Japan, and the English-speaking developed world are at the top of our ranking. Despite its wealth and development stage, Italy ranks near the bottom of the list, just ahead of Argentina, Greece, and Russia. Emerging countries also tend to perform poorly on this measure. Once we exclude the effect of income, Italy and Greece stand out as having an especially weak rule of law. In general, the European periphery and Latin American countries rate toward the bottom, with the rest of the developed world and emerging Asian countries toward the top. Singapore stays at the top even after taking out income, along with other rich nations. The US and Japan rate as having a rule of law that is just modestly strong given their levels of income.

在考虑到收入水平之前，新加坡，日本和英语发达国家都处于排名榜首位。尽管其财富和发展阶段，意大利排在靠近阿根廷，希腊和俄罗斯的名单的底部。新兴国家在这一措施上往往表现不佳。一旦我们排除了收入的影响，意大利和希腊就显得特别弱小的法治。一般来说，欧洲周边国家和拉丁美洲国家处于低位，其余发达国家和新兴亚洲国家走高。新加坡与其他富裕国家一起取得收入也是最高的。由于美国和日本的收入水平，美国和日本的法治水平只有适度的强度。