Blavatnik Index of Public Administration

A well-functioning public administration is necessary for governments to achieve their objectives. Irrespective of constitutional design and how a government is formed, it is the organisations and people that make up its public administration and civil service that support the government of a country to deliver outcomes and impact for individual citizens, the economy and society at large.

Individually, governments have ever larger volumes of data and information about how their administrations work The World Bank’s recent Government Analytics Handbook1 brings together advice and examples of practice of how countries can use data and analysis to improve operational and policy performance. Much of the data available to senior officials about the operation and management of their administration is domestic, either created by or solely about their country and its particular set-up.

Beyond the domestic there is also value in international comparisons. This is often done in terms of policy outcomes – the overall state of public finances, GDP growth or labour market performance, educational and health outcomes, or environmental statistics, etc. There already exist other indexes and indicators of public governance, the most prominent being the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators2. These tend to take a multifaceted approach combining assessments of the functioning of the executive with ratings of the quality of democracy, the rule of law and assessments of policy performance. While these indexes and indicators provide important macro-level assessments of how countries perform, it can be difficult for senior officials to understand how the aspects they are directly responsible for compare or indeed the actions they can take to improve.

In addition to governance indicators, there also exists an array of other thematic data that can act as a source for international comparisons. For example, data from the IMF, OECD and others on tax administration, data from academics at the University of Gothenburg on integrity and recruitment in the public sector, data from the World Bank on the adoption of digital government, data from civil society researchers on the openness and coverage of official statistics, and so on.

Between 2016 and 2020 the Blavatnik School of Government – in partnership with the Institute for Government and the UK Cabinet Office, and funded by the Open Society Foundations – developed and published two editions of the International Civil Service Effectiveness (InCiSE) Index3. The InCiSE Index demonstrated the interest in and potential for comparative international benchmarking of public administrations and civil services. The Blavatnik Index of Public Administration is a refreshed and updated approach to benchmarking that builds on the foundations developed by the previous InCiSE Index.

Like the InCiSE Index, the aim of the Blavatnik Index is to foster a data-informed approach to peer learning about the management and reform of public administrations and civil services. It seeks to achieve this goal by bringing together data from different sources into a single tool that makes it easier for officials, politicians and others to better understand how countries compare. The Index is designed from the outset to be a practical tool using a relatively simple and transparent methodology to make it easy to trace how a country performs in the Index back to the source and prioritises data that is openly available and easy to interpret.

A secondary aim is to promote a dialogue about the extent and quality of the available data. Some themes covered within the Index have a large amount of data available while in others there are only one or two metrics available globally, and for some themes there is no useable data. In some cases there is good data for a particular theme but it is only available for a certain subset of countries and so this has not been included. Even in areas where there is good global coverage, there are still questions about whether the available data fully measures what matters most or would be most useful to help countries learn from each other.

Conceptual framework

It is often said that government is a ‘black box’ that nobody understands. Those of us who work in or with governments know that this is not the case, and that there are many different frameworks for conceptualising and thinking about government. Five years on from the 2019 InCiSE Index, drawing on desk research, workshops and other input from both academics and practitioners, the Blavatnik Index adopts a refreshed framework. It includes aspects of the InCiSE framework, such as integrity and policymaking, as well as new components such as the use of data and system oversight.

Building on the work of InCiSE, the logic model of the Index’s conceptual framework is that public administrations take inputs (political direction, public finances and human resources) and through its activities, outputs and qualities helps achieve outcomes and impact (changes in society and the economy). The Index does not seek to measure either inputs or outcomes, instead focussing on the activities, outputs and qualities of public administrations and thus theoretically, given the same set of inputs, a country with a better public administration will deliver better outcomes.

The logic model recognises that besides inputs there are a range of other contextual factors that influence the capacity and ability of public administrations. The model recognises that there are a range of other actors, such as regional government, businesses and local communities, all of whom are vital partners for public administrations.

The measurement framework of the Index is structured around four domains that represent broad areas of public administration activity:

  • Strategy and Leadership – the setting of strategic direction, institutional stewardship, the core public service values and behaviours.
  • Public Policy – core public administration functions and activities that are fundamental for any national government.
  • National Delivery – direct public service delivery at the national level, and oversight of the wider range of public services delivered by others.
  • People and Processes – the realities of working in or for the public administration.
Diagram of the Index's framework

The Blavatnik Index conceptual framework


  1. Rogger D and Schuster C (eds), 2023, The Government Analytics Handbook: Leveraging Data to Strengthen Public Administration. Washington, DC: World Bank. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-1957-5 ↩︎