7 KEY INDICATORS TO MEASURE PUBLIC GOVERNANCE

There are seven key indicators to measure Public Governance : Rule of Law, Government Efficiency, Responsiveness, Transparency, Corruption Control, Accountability and Public Participation.

1. Rule of Law: The Rule of Law focuses on the rigor and efficiency of the judicial and legislative systems and serves to examine if a country provides a stable environment for investment and international competitiveness. The development of the rule of law has three sub-dimensions: legislative regulation, the judicial system and police administration.
2. Government Efficiency: Aside from looking at the policy achievements of the government, both generally and in terms of specific policies, this dimension analyses the government’s ability to implement policies and its consistency regarding the direction of policy making.
3. Responsiveness: Responsiveness refers to how far government policies satisfy public demands. The purpose of this dimension is to look at whether individual policies respond to public needs, and whether policy-making generally is able to take account of different public demands. Survey results may be classified by individual policy or ‘policy making’ to better understand the levels of public satisfaction.
4. Transparency: Transparency denotes the availability of clear, accurate and low-cost information on government policies, elections and finances. There are three sub-dimensions: information transparency, political transparency and financial transparency.µ
5. Corruption Control: Corruption refers to any behavior leading to illegitimate personal gain for any individual or group within the executive, legislative and judicial branches in the course of their duties or political activities. This indicator looks at the situation within the government as well as examine the state of political ethics underpinning it. Surveys may be categorized into ‘corruption impression and ‘ethical infrastructure’. Corruption impression looks at the abuse of political power for personal gain in the executive, legislative, judicial branches and other, while ethical infrastructure measures the strengths of ethical standards and anti-corruption measures.
6. Accountability: Accountability looks at the strength of external supervision of the government’s use of data and exercise of political power, including the forms of accountability, the relationship between the executive and legislative branches and the personal integrity of civil servants. This dimension focuses on auditing, budget control, government procurement, behavior guidelines and representative accountability.
7. Public participation: This dimension looks at the current level of public participation in government and social affairs, including the political party system, the role of interest groups in policy implementation, and freedom of the media and political expression. This dimension contains two subtopics: political participation and media and freedom of speech.

Overall Public Governance Quality Ranking of EU Countries

1. Finland
2. Denmark
3. Sweden
4. Luxembourg
5. Netherlands
6. Austria
7. Ireland
8. Germany
9. United Kingdom
10. Belgium
11. France
12. Malta
13. Cyprus
14. Estonia
15. Portugal
16. Czech Republic
17. Slovenia
18. Spain
19. Poland
20. Slovakia
21. Hungary
22. Lithuania
23. Latvia
24. Italy
25. Greece
26. Bulgaria
27. Romania