The aim of the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration is to compare the qualities and functions of national bureaucracies – the work of officials in the achievement of a national government’s objectives. While this scope sounds simple at first glance, defining the unit(s) of analysis is not, as even among countries with shared administrative cultures or histories there are idiosyncrasies in each country’s own system of government.

There are three traditional approaches to defining a country’s “public administration” or “civil service”:

• An organisational approach which focuses on the structure of government, featuring “upstream” entities (e.g. ministries) which set the policy direction and procedural regulation for “downstream” entities (e.g. agencies) that implement policy or deliver services.
• An accounting approach which focuses on the entities which are owned/controlled by the national government and included in the “general government” category in the UN’s System of National Accounts (SNA).
• An employment status approach which focuses on the body of individuals employed as civil servants.

All three of these approaches present challenges for cross-country comparisons:

• The organisational approach is influenced by the constitutional arrangements and administrative norms of a country: whether a country is a federal or unitary state, whether a country is highly centralised or decentralised in its approach to policy development and/or public service delivery, whether public services are delivered by publicly owned entities or outsourced to private sector or civil society entities.
• The accounting approach is an overly broad definition designed for the compilation of national accounts and the comparison government spending. As such, it encompasses not only national government activity but that of all public sector entities, including sub-national and municipal government, public corporations and many other entities which do tend to fall within the definitions used by practitioners and researchers when discussing the bureaucratic activities of government officials.
• Some countries have distinct employment regimes (laws/regulations) that create a separate category of employment for “civil servants” separate from other types of workers but others do not and rely on individual laws/regulations or contractual terms to define any particular additional responsibilities/privileges. Even in countries with distinct employment regimes there are variations who this regime applies to, for example whether it is limited to just national government employees or covers all public employment in the country.

It is also important to define what the Index does not intend to measure, namely policy outcomes or wider aspects of public governance:

• The Index does not measure policy outcomes (e.g. life expectancy, literacy rates, unemployment rates, incomes or economic growth). The Index seeks to provide a way of measuring and comparing bureaucracies whereas the goals for policy outcomes are set by politicians. The logic model of the Index’s conceptual framework assumes that for two countries with the same goal, the country with the “better” bureaucracy ought to achieve better outcomes (all other things being equal). Even where countries have similar goals, they may take very different approaches to achieving those goals or set different targets to measure their progress.
• The Index also does not measure wider aspects of public governance or democracy such as the legislature, the judiciary or the rule of law, or media and academic freedom. These wider aspects, while crucial to understand a country’s governance in full are more directly considerations for political rather than administrative actors. The Index is intended to be a practical tool to help understand how public administrations work and where countries can learn from others to drive improvements.

We use two criteria to define the scope and unit(s) of analysis for the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration:

• The Index measures national-level governments – the central/federal government entity of a country are the primary focus, but relying on “general government” or “public sector” proxies if necessary.
• The Index measures executive/administrative activities and characteristics – the activities and characteristics of the national government’s executive, especially relating to the administration of government and public services.