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The Blavatnik Index of Public Administration 2024 is a tool designed to provide leaders of national civil services and public administrations with a clear, accessible and robust dataset on how civil services and public administrations around the world compare. Our ambition for the Index is to foster a more data and evidence informed approach to the management and reform of civil services and public administrations.
The Index builds on the Blavatnik School of Government’s previous experience of collaborating, with the Institute for Government and the UK Cabinet Office, in the production of the International Civil Service Effectiveness (InCiSE) Index from 2016 to 2020. While inspired by and a conceptual successor to the InCiSE Index, changes to methodology, data availability and country coverage mean that the results of the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration are not directly comparable to the results of the InCiSE Index.
The need for an index of public administration
Benchmarking is a common practice in performance management, the comparison of a unit (a company, a school, an employee) with its peers can identify that unit’s strengths and weaknesses and potential opportunities for improvement. As a result of its natural monopoly, it can be difficult to compare the activities and characteristics of a country’s national government with other organisations and institutions within that country. Therefore, international comparisons with how other governments operate are often sought.
There already exist many sources of data for international comparisons, which can be difficult for the leaders of civil services and public administrations to distil and understand how their country is performing. The purpose of the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration is to provide a coherent approach to using these existing data and to focus on the data most relevant to the operation of civil services and public administrations. Table 1 1 provides a comparison of the Blavatnik Index with other types of data available to officials for comparing how their civil service or public administration compares with others.
The principal benefit of the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration is a tool that supports peer learning, by providing comparative analysis of data that senior officials and ministers that measures things they can directly act on.
In the achievement of this goal the Index should be used to complement other sources of data and evidence in any exercise to understand how a country’s civil service or public administration is performing. In addition to other types of international comparisons (e.g. measuring economic, social or environmental outcomes), governments will have their own set of performance targets and outcome data that relates to their specific political goals and takes account of their particular context.
| Type of comparative source | Comment | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Governance indices | In addition to assessments of the executive branch of government these indices tend to include assessments of: the legislative and judicial branches; the nature of democracy and political institutions; media, academic and civil society freedoms; and, possibly, the achievement of policy outcomes. Many of these additional aspects are outside the direct influence of officials and are the result of political choices/cultures. | World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators, Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Sustainable Governance Indicators, Chandler Good Government Index |
| Thematic indices | These indices focus on a single topic of interest. As a result, they either focus on a narrow aspect of the activities of government or only a small subset of its data directly measures activities or characteristics of civil services and public administrations. | Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, World Justice Project Rule of Law Index, OECD iREG Index |
| Regular data collections | Like thematic indices these data collections often (but not always) focus on a single topic of interest, however they may have no (or multiple) headline measures rather than a single index. As with thematic indices they either focus on a narrow aspect of government or only a subset of its data is directly relevant to the management and leadership of public administrations. | European Commission eGovernment Benchmark Report, UN’s Sendai Framework Monitoring, Quality of Government Institute Expert Survey, International Survey of Revenue Administration |