Ask which country has the best system of government and the answer you get is usually subjective: whichever country the media mentions most often, or the one the person happens to know best. Yet the country named may well excel in one area while lagging in another.

Several institutions around the world have tackled this problem with research that measures government performance systematically, each with its own criteria, dimensions, and methodology. The goal is simple: anyone reading a score should know exactly what is being assessed, where the numbers come from, and when that particular yardstick is the right one to use.

With that in hand, these indices serve two purposes: answering which country has the best overall governance, and (often more usefully) identifying which country makes the best benchmark for one specific aspect, be it workforce management, procurement transparency, or public trust. Here are four indices and one data hub that serve both purposes.

Blavatnik Index of Public Administration

The index is maintained by the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and assesses one thing specifically: the quality of public administration. It does not measure policy outcomes such as economic growth, nor political dimensions such as press freedom. Its focus is purely on how the bureaucracy works, what might be called the “engine” of government.

The assessment is divided into four domains:

1. Strategy and Leadership assesses a government’s capacity for long-term strategic planning, openness and communication with the public, integrity and corruption control, and the ability to innovate.
2. Public Policy assesses the quality of the policymaking process, regulatory quality, crisis and risk management, and the use of data in decision-making.
3. National Delivery assesses system oversight, the maturity of digital services, the quality of tax administration, and the efficiency of border services.
4. People and Processes assesses what it is like to work inside the bureaucracy: workforce diversity and inclusion, human resource management practices, procurement openness, and technology and the working environment. This is the most relevant domain when the goal is to compare how governments develop the competence of their civil servants.

The Blavatnik Index runs no surveys of its own. Instead, it aggregates 17 external data sources into 82 metrics, ranging from official statistics (such as ILOSTAT from the International Labour Organization and the EIGE gender database) to institutional assessments (such as the World Bank’s GovTech Maturity Index) and expert surveys (such as V-Dem and the Quality of Government Expert Survey). Its “respondents,” in effect, are a mix of statistical agencies, expert assessors, and officials completing administrative surveys across countries. Each metric is normalized to a scale of 0 to 1 with no weighting (no metric counts for more than any other), and missing data is never patched with estimates, so a country only enters the rankings once its data coverage is sufficient. The 2024 edition covers 120 countries.

The Blavatnik Index is most useful for concrete cross-country comparisons of bureaucratic performance, for instance when choosing a reference country for civil service reform or designing competency development programs for public officials.

Results, methodology, and raw data are available at index.bsg.ox.ac.uk, with open code and data files at github.com/blavatnik-index.

 

Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI)

Maintained by the World Bank and running since 1996, the WGI measure the quality of governance as a whole, not just the bureaucracy. If Blavatnik grades the government’s “engine,” the WGI grade the entire car, including who is driving, how they drive, and how the driver handles whatever the road throws at them.

The WGI assess six dimensions:

1. Voice and Accountability measures the extent to which citizens can participate in selecting their government, along with freedom of expression, freedom of association, and media freedom.
2. Political Stability and Absence of Violence measures the likelihood of a government being destabilized by unconstitutional means or violence, including terrorism.
3. Government Effectiveness measures the quality of public services and the bureaucracy, the competence of civil servants, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to its own policies.
4. Regulatory Quality measures a government’s ability to formulate and implement sound regulations that enable the private sector.
5. Rule of Law measures the extent to which people trust and abide by the rules of society, including the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police, and the courts.
6. Control of Corruption measures the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, from petty corruption to state capture by elites.

The WGI are entirely perception-based. The numbers are drawn from more than 30 sources, including household and firm surveys, expert assessments from research institutes and non-governmental organizations, and evaluations by multilateral institutions and business information providers. The respondents, in other words, are citizens, businesses, and experts rather than governments’ own administrative records. These dozens of perception sources are then combined through a statistical model (the Unobserved Components Model) into standardized scores on a scale of -2.5 to +2.5, along with percentile ranks from 0 to 100.

Given its long time span, the WGI are most useful for tracking a country’s governance trends since 1996 and mapping its position at a macro level, including comparing political and administrative dimensions within one and the same country.

Interactive data and reports are available at worldbank.org/governance/wgi.

 

Global Survey of Public Servants (GSPS)

The survey is run by a consortium led by the World Bank’s Bureaucracy Lab together with several universities. Where Blavatnik and the WGI assess the bureaucracy from the outside, the GSPS assesses it from within, through the voices of government employees themselves.

The aspects measured include:

1. Motivation and engagement explores how driven employees are to serve the public and how attached they are to their work.
2. Human resource management practices explores how recruitment, promotion, and performance appraisal actually play out on the ground, not merely how the rules are written.
3. Integrity and ethics explores employees’ perceptions of corruption, favoritism, and fairness within their own institutions.
4. Work environment and satisfaction explores working conditions, relationships with management, and overall job satisfaction.

The GSPS uses harmonized primary surveys: the core questionnaire is kept identical across countries so that results can be compared, while still allowing adaptation to local context. Surveys roll out country by country, usually in partnership with national governments or local research institutions, so coverage grows over time rather than arriving all at once as a global index would.

The GSPS is a fitting complement to system-level scores like Blavatnik’s: it captures the human side of the bureaucracy.

Country data and thematic reports are available at globalsurveyofpublicservants.org.

 

OECD Government at a Glance

Published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this report presents detailed data on government practices, primarily in developed countries.

The aspects covered include:

1. Public finance and fiscal policy presents the structure of government spending, revenue, and debt.
2. The public sector workforce presents the composition, size, and management of government employment.
3. Digital government and open data presents the maturity of digital services along with the availability and use of open government data.
4. Participation and public trust presents how involved citizens are in policy processes and how much they trust government institutions.

The main report focuses on OECD members and accession candidates, so for developing countries it is best read as an aspirational reference. For a more level comparison involving Indonesia, there is a dedicated Southeast Asia edition published jointly with the Asian Development Bank.

The data blend three types of sources: administrative data and official statistics submitted directly by member governments, OECD surveys of government officials on practices and policies, and citizen perception surveys, including the OECD Trust Survey on public confidence in institutions.

The report is best suited to aspirational benchmarking against advanced-economy standards, or, through the Southeast Asia edition, to a more realistic comparison between Indonesia and its ASEAN peers.

The main report is available at the official OECD Government at a Glance 2025 page.

 

(Honorable Mention) Quality of Government Institute

The Quality of Government (QoG) Institute at the University of Gothenburg is not an index but an academic data and research center. Rather than producing a single score, it compiles hundreds of governance datasets from various sources into one standardized database, free to download for research.

Its main contribution lies in two things:

1. A unified database brings together data from the WGI, V-Dem, Freedom House, and dozens of other sources in a consistent format, so researchers can analyze across sources without having to clean the data themselves.
2. A conceptual framework offers a definition of “quality of government” as a matter of impartiality: the extent to which the state treats its citizens equally regardless of who they are. This framework provides a theoretical foundation that ranking-based indices often lack.

As a data hub, most of its content is secondary compilation from other datasets. The institute does, however, run a primary survey of its own, the Quality of Government Expert Survey, whose respondents are academics and public administration experts around the world.

The database and its documentation are available at qog.gu.se.

 

When One Country Is Strong in Some Areas but Weak in Others

Because each of the indices above covers several dimensions, the assessment need not stop at the question of which country governs best overall (the league-table reading), but can move on to a more useful question: which country is good at what.

The payoff is twofold. For policymakers, reading dimension by dimension makes it easier to benchmark on a specific field. For general readers, the spread of a country’s scores reveals which values that country holds dear.

Take Singapore. On five of the six WGI dimensions, the country sits among the very best in the world, and it holds the highest Government Effectiveness score globally. Yet on Voice and Accountability, Singapore ranks only around the 44th percentile, behind the majority of democracies. That profile tells the story of the country’s chosen values: legitimacy built on tangible development results rather than on open political competition.

The same pattern appears at the regional scale. East Asia tends to be strong on Government Effectiveness but weak on Voice and Accountability, while Latin America is comparatively good at citizen participation yet lags in bureaucratic capacity. The world’s two great regions read almost as mirror images of each other.

The imbalance can even run in surprising directions. Ukraine, whose overall scores are far from the world’s elite, ranks first in procurement data openness on the Blavatnik Index, ahead of Singapore and the Nordic countries. That strength was born of crisis: public procurement that once cost the state around two billion US dollars a year prompted anti-corruption activists, in the wake of the 2014 Maidan Revolution, to build an electronic procurement system called ProZorro, meaning “transparent.” Initiated by civil society, the system was later adopted by the government and made mandatory by law in 2016, on one simple principle: everyone sees everything.

These findings carry two lessons. First, a high score in one dimension is no guide to any other, so an index is more valuable as a lens on several dimensions than as a single verdict. Second, the reference country may differ from one dimension to the next: learning workforce management from Norway and procurement transparency from Ukraine may serve better than copying any single country wholesale. Excellence on an index is, in the end, a map of a country’s reform priorities through its history.