This article, published in the European Journal for Development Research is a response to the article “What do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure?” by M. Thomas (2009) where he dismisses the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) as an ‘elaborate and unsupported hypothesis’ because of the failure to demonstrate the ‘construct validity’ of these indicators.

The authors argue that ‘construct validity’ is not a useful tool to assess the merits of the WGI, and even if it were, Thomas provides no evidence of any practical consequences of failure to meet the criteria of construct validity.