Blavatnik Index of Public Administration

We trust that this first edition of the Blavatnik Index of Public Administration, building on the work of InCiSE, motivates those leading national-level public administrations to complement their existing data and analysis on how their institutions are performing with international comparisons and to learn from others. The results and methodology are open source materials; we encourage further analysis of the Index itself and its relationship with other indicators. Longer term, we hope to stimulate improvements in the data landscape for international comparisons of public administrations and civil services.

Exploring the relationship with inputs and outcomes

The guiding logic of the Index’s conceptual framework is that public administrations and civil services are the means by which governments take inputs (political direction, financial and human resources) and achieve outcomes (economic and social progress). There is much still to be done to explore the relationships between the Index and inputs and outcomes however we have undertaken some initial analysis.

We looked at two input measures – (1) population as a proxy for scale complexity, and (2) government expenditure as a proportion of GDP - as a relative measure of the resources governments have available at their disposal. Our initial analysis found no strong correlation between the Index score with either population size or government expenditure.

We looked at two high-level outcome measures – (1) GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity) and (2) the World Bank’s Human Capital Index. The Index correlates strongly with GDP per capita and with the Human Capital Index. There is already a strong correlation between GDP per capita and human capital, and even after accounting for this the Blavatnik Index score still has a statistically significant correlation with the Human Capital Index. This suggests that even after accounting for economic development, countries with better public administrations tend to have better social outcomes. We wish to encourage further analysis of the relationship between the quality of public administration and indicators of economic and social outcomes.

Helping governments to use the Index to inform and support their reform plans

Users will naturally be curious about how a country ranks in the overall Index, however it is in the scores for the domains and themes that a richer picture of performance, strengths and areas for development emerges. The Index is not a definitive assessment of a country’s performance and is intended to be complementary to, and used in conjunction with, domestic and other sources of information. Together, this data and analysis should help officials, politicians and others interested in the performance of public administrations to identify areas for action and sources of inspiration.

We are committed to helping public administrations use the information and analysis in the Index, alongside domestic data and other international sources, to inform their reform and improvement plans. The Blavatnik School will help convene global peer learning sessions, both regionally and domain-focused, to share good practice. We will engage with individual public administrations to understand and use their results,; and publish a range of insight notes and other articles highlighting key findings from the Index.

More detailed data and information on our methodology can be found on the Index’s website, https://index.bsg.ox.ac.uk, along with interactive tools to support peer comparisons and learning. In making the results and methodology of the Index open source, we encourage others to make full use of the Index as a resource for comparisons, for example, incorporating data only available for a subset of countries or use the framework and domestic data to compare different ministries or sub-national governments.

Conducting further research and analysis on regional and thematic comparisons

There are many areas where one can take a deep dive into the Index to conduct further data and research. In addition to our own research analysis at the Blavatnik School, we encourage others to be curious about the data and the opportunities for further exploration. Potential areas for examination include: working with partners to create regional versions of the Index which can draw on datasets with narrower geographic coverage; exploring further the correlations between performance on the Index with inputs and outcomes; and investigating specific themes to understand why certain countries perform more strongly than others.

Collaboration to improve the data landscape on public administration

The landscape of data about public administration is often changing. In the five years since the InCiSE 2019 report we have been able to expand coverage from 38 OECD/EU countries to 120 countries, in part due to new or expanded data collections. However, there remain limitations in the available data.

Some themes are not covered or only have limited data available. In other themes there is good data available but we have not been able to include it in the Index as it is available for only a small subset of countries, or there are concerns about the robustness of the data. Even in themes where we have been able to source a large number of metrics, there are opportunities to refine and improve what is collected so that the available data better reflects the actual practice of public administration.

These gaps in the data landscape present opportunities for new research and collections, to extend or replicate existing efforts, and in some cases 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.