The previous International Civil Service Effectiveness (InCiSE) Index covered only OECD and EU member countries (31 countries in 2017 and 38 countries in 2019), driven somewhat by the InCiSE Index’s reliance on several sources limited to either OECD or EU countries (11 of the 25 sources for the InCiSE Index 2019 had an OECD or EU member scope). In establishing the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration, we adopted a desire to produce an index with a more global scope, either in addition to or instead of an index limited to OECD/EU countries.

Following the scoping exercise to identify potential sources (see section 2) and the mapping exercise to align source data to our conceptual framework (see section 4) we were able to review geographic coverage. Of the 147 data points identified for inclusion in the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration: 70 have a “global” coverage, that is they cover a large number of countries/territories (min: 109, median: 140, max: 198), 70 are limited to OECD or EU member countries and associated partners (min: 21, median: 40, max: 51), and 7 are limited to a largely non-OECD scope (all from a single source covering 137 countries, comprising countries which were not OECD members prior to 1989).

Based on this spread of data it was decided to focus construction of the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration on the data from “global” sources. In addition to the global sources, data from the non-OECD source and its companion source with an OECD/EU scope were also selected for inclusion. As a result, the Index is made up of 82 metrics (the 70 global data points plus 7 metrics from the non-OECD source and 5 from its companion OECD source). Table 2-1 summarises the number of metrics by theme and scope. All but 4 of the 20 themes defined in the Index’s conceptual framework are measured in the global Index, two themes only have data from sources with an OECD/EU scope (cross-government collaboration and employee engagement), while for one theme (social security) no relevant data was identified. While not included in the overall Index calculations, data from the OECD/EU specific sources has been retained and processed to allow for deeper analysis of particular themes.