Government at a Glance 2019

Government at a Glance provides reliable, internationally comparative data on government activities and their results in OECD countries. Where possible, it also reports data for Brazil, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, the Russian Federation and South Africa. In many public governance areas, it is the only available source of data. It includes input, process, output and outcome indicators as well as contextual information for each country.
The 2019 edition includes input indicators on public finance and employment; while processes include data on institutions, budgeting practices and procedures, human resources management, regulatory government, public procurement and digital government and open data. Outcomes cover core government results (e.g. trust, inequality reduction) and indicators on access, responsiveness, quality and citizen satisfaction for the education, health and justice sectors. Governance indicators are especially useful for monitoring and benchmarking governments’ progress in their public sector reforms.
Each indicator in the publication is presented in a user-friendly format, consisting of graphs and/or charts illustrating variations across countries and over time, brief descriptive analyses highlighting the major findings conveyed by the data, and a methodological section on the definition of the indicator and any limitations in data comparability.
Also available in: French
Serving Citizens Scorecards
This chapter describes how OECD countries are performing in terms of access, responsiveness and quality of services, based on the OECD Serving Citizens Framework. The scorecards summarise the key aspects of countries’ services systems (access, responsiveness and quality) by displaying a subset of sector-specific measures from education, health and justice. They are an illustration of how the performance of public services can be compared, even when they are organised in distinct ways and address different aspects of societal and individual life. Although country rankings are provided, these are only computed to compare indicators that differ in terms of measurement units and underlying phenomena. Hence, the scorecards do not provide a unified picture of which countries have the best overall services, nor should they be used for such purpose.