How should the results be interpreted?

The Blavatnik Index of Public Administration aims to provide a common framework to assess the performance of civil services and public administrations across the world, to enable peer learning and catalyse improvements.

The results and methodology of the Index are open source and we encourage users to make full use of the Index as a resource for assessing comparative performance.

We also encourage practitioners to look beyond the overall score into the detail of the domains to reflect meaningfully on their performance and that of their peers.

How have the countries been selected?

The Index covers 120 countries, which have been selected via a data coverage assessment, this assessment considers not just the overall availability of data for a country but the spread of that data across the Index’s conceptual framework. These countries represent a broad spread of geographic regions, incomes levels and population sizes.

How robust is the data and what time period does it cover?

The data in the report comes from a mix of multilateral institutions (such as the United Nations or the World Bank), academic projects (such as the University of Gothenburg), and non-government researchers (such as the Data 4 Development Network). All of the data meets four key criteria:

• Open access – the data source and its methodology must be published online in a free-to-access form.
• Actionable – the data must measure some quality or component that officials or ministers can act on to improve performance/practice.
• Quantifiable – the data must be something that can be represented numerically either as a quantity or an ordinal scale.
• Recency – the data should have been updated after 1 January 2019. The data used ranges from 2019-2023, with the majority relating to 2021-2023.

We are still only at the beginning of this journey: the available comparative data about the qualities and functions of public administrations is not as good as we would like it to be. Some aspects of our framework such as openness or integrity have several sources of data covering many countries, while others, such as procurement or collaboration, are much more difficult to measure or have data limited to specific sets of countries.

Gaps in the data landscape present opportunities for new research and collection, to extend existing efforts or to make use of new technologies to extract and collate the increasing amounts of data governments publish about themselves. We hope that in due course this improves the data landscape and as a result enhances the quality and value of international comparisons of public administrations.

How have the metrics been selected?

The Blavatnik Index of Public Administration uses a framework that draws on both academic and practitioner input, seeking to resonate with how senior officials think about and manage their public administration or civil service.

The Index’s framework is based on the logic that public administrations take inputs (political direction, public finances and human resources) and through their activities, outputs and qualities help to 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 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 also recognises that there are a range of other actors (e.g. sub-national government) which not only influence outcomes and impact directly but that any public administration also has a two-way relationship with.

The conceptual 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.

82 different metrics have been identified by from 17 different sources that provide data on different aspects defined by the Index’s conceptual framework.