More than a decade after the financial crisis, OECD countries are still experiencing relatively slow economic growth. They are also saddled with a large debt burden, and facing challenges related to ageing populations and rapid technological change. At the same time, people’s trust in public institutions and the their perception of the responsiveness, integrity and efficiency of the public sector have yet to fully recover from the crisis, limiting the capacity of governments to implement necessary reforms. In this context, taking a people-centric approach to policy making and service delivery becomes urgent. Such an approach entails governments better taking the needs and expectations expressed by the people into account when designing, implementing and evaluating public policies and services.

Today, the worst consequences of the 2008 financial crisis may be behind us. Yet, most OECD countries are still saddled with high debt loads that, on average, amounted to 110% of GDP in 2017. Such high debt levels reduce governments’ ability to stimulate economic growth and address imperative challenges, including rising inequalities and a sense of insecurity induced by rapid technological advancements that are making many people feel insecure about the future of their work. Redistribution through taxes and transfers has fallen. There is also less money available for investment, while the urgency to renew ailing infrastructure is becoming increasingly apparent.

Government at a Glance 2019 presents a dashboard of key indicators of public sector performance and policies that governments are implementing to reconnect with their people, improve equality and spur more inclusive growth. The policy chapter focuses on how “people-centric” public services are performing in terms of access, responsiveness and quality. The report provides outcome indicators on education, health and justice, complemented with measures of how people perceive those public services. The publication also reviews, through internationally comparable indicators, public governance practices and reforms from the perspective of people-centricity, for example in budgeting, regulatory governance, public procurement and the use of open government data.

In order to accurately interpret the data included in Government at a Glance 2019, readers need to be familiar with the following methodological considerations that cut across a number of indicators.

The Government at a Glance series aims to provide reliable, internationally comparable data on government activities and their results in OECD countries and beyond. In turn, these data can be used by countries to benchmark their governments’ performance, track domestic and international developments over time and provide evidence of the impact of their public policies. The indicators in Government at a Glance are becoming themselves a measuring standard in many fields of public governance and have extended beyond the OECD to cover countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia. In addition to the core indicators that constitute the trademark of the publication, this sixth edition includes a selection of new indicators and additional data sources, allowing for a more complete picture of the work and results of public administrations across OECD countries. In the current edition, about two-fifths of the indicators presented are based on primary evidence collected directly from government officials through OECD survey instruments. The remainder comes from secondary sources and is based, either on administrative records (e.g. public finances) or household surveys (e.g. trust, satisfaction with services) or to a lesser extent on expert assessment collected by other organisations (e.g. the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index).

Along with debt accumulation and economic uncertainty, the 2008 economic crisis provoked discontent among citizens. People wonder whether governments are truly working for the public interest or only for just a few. Such disenchantment is eroding the foundations of democratic systems in OECD countries and beyond and requires urgent action to strengthen the legitimacy of public institutions. Although in many OECD countries, there are signs that people’s trust in their government is finally improving after deteriorating since the crisis, in others, trust remains stubbornly lower than in 2007. This chapter argues that by taking a people-centric approach to policy making and service delivery, governments can rebuild trust in the public administration, improve the effectiveness of public action and better respond to the global and domestic challenges OECD countries face.

The following table provides detailed information about how the aggregates of taxes, net social contributions, sales, and grants and other revenues presented in “Public finance and economics” were constructed from the OECD National Accounts data.

Developed by the OECD, the Classification of the Functions of Government (COFOG) classifies government expenditure data from the System of National Accounts by the purpose for which the funds are used. As Table C.1 illustrates, first-level COFOG splits expenditure data into ten “functional” groups or sub-sectors of expenditures (such as economic affairs, education and social protection), and second-level COFOG further splits each first-level group into up to nine sub-groups. While first-level COFOG data are available for 32 out of the 36 OECD countries (according to time series availability), second-level COFOG data are currently only available for 26 OECD European countries plus Israel and Japan.* First-level COFOG expenditures data are not available for Canada, Chile and Mexico. Until recently, second level COFOG data were available in some national statistical offices, but were not collected by international organisations. Moreover, the second-level COFOG data were not always fully comparable among countries because the SNA/UN guide and the International Monetary Fund Manual on Government Finance Statistics did not provide much practical information on the application of COFOG concepts. However, in 2005, Eurostat established a task force on guidance on the application of COFOG to national account expenditure data and to discuss the collection of second-level COFOG data for European countries. Second-level COFOG data are not available for Turkey and all non-European member countries of the OECD, except Israel and Japan. In addition, these data are available only for selected COFOG divisions in some members of the European Union. Efforts are underway to reach agreement with these countries about the submission of these data to the OECD

The following classification resulted from the 2016 OECD Survey on Strategic Human Resources Management updated in 2019, which also used the same definitions as in the 2016 OECD Survey on Composition of Employees in Central/Federal Governments. This classification defines the four main hierarchical levels of occupations.

The narrowly defined composite indexes presented in Government at a Glance represent the best way of summarising discrete, qualitative information. “Composite indexes are much easier to interpret than trying to find a common trend in many separate indicators” (Nardo et al., 2005). However, their development and use can be controversial. These indexes are easily and often misinterpreted by users due to a lack of transparency as to how they are generated and the resulting difficulty to truly unpack what they are actually measuring.

2.5. Net capital transfers as a percentage of GDP [https://doi.org/10.1787/888934034011]