Sustainable Governance Indicators

From Wikiprogress.org

Jump to:navigation, search

About

The Sustainable Governance Indicators (SGI) are a non-profit project run by the Bertelsmann Stiftung, one of Germany’s leading private operative think-tanks encouraging social change.

The SGI analyse and compare the need for economic, political and social reform in OECD member countries. The SGI incorporate both qualitative and quantitative data on government related activities and examine the extent to which OECD member country governments are dealing with key issues. The SGI were first released in spring 2009.

Watch the short introduction video clip about the scope of SGI.

The Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Sustainable Governance Indicators 2011 have been launched on 31 March 2011, the second major publication of data that builds on the successful and widely acknowledged first release in 2009. On the basis of 65 qualitative and 82 quantitative indicators, the SGI analyse and compare the need for reform in 31 OECD member countries as well as their ability to respond to current social and political challenges. The period under review ranges from May 2008 to April 2010, displaying the countries’ performance amid the global financial turmoil and economic crisis.

The SGI’s in-depth country reports and the international rankings are backed up by the collective expertise of more than 80 renowned international scientists.

The SGI assess sustainable governance along two pillars: a Status Index and a Management Index.

I. The Status Index answers the following questions:

How high is the quality of each country’s democratic system?
How successful are OECD countries in achieving sustainable policy outcomes in 15 single policy areas?

II. The driving question behind the Management Index is as follows:

How effective is strategic steering capability within the context of the interactions between government and social actors?

In answering this question, the SGI’s Management Index looks to a wide and innovative set of indicators. These indicators enable a nuanced assessment of the extent to which OECD governments – in cooperation with other institutions and social groups in the context of democratic decision-making processes – are able to identify pressing future problems, develop finely tuned political solutions, and subsequently implement them effectively and efficiently.

The SGI 2011 release is accompanied by a comprehensive overhaul of the project’s website. The entire data of the SGI 2011 survey, detailed rankings and sub-rankings for each policy area as well as all country reports are accessible online free of charge. On the basis of the SGI 2011 data, several area-specific studies are forthcoming, e.g. a study featuring the state of social justice in advanced societies.

Social Justice in the OECD 2011

The report released by SGI in October 2011 offers a comparative assessment of 31 OECD countries with regard to six key dimensions: poverty prevention, equitable access to education, labour market inclusiveness, social cohesion and non-discrimination, health as well as intergenerational justice. The full report, "Social Justice in the OECD – How Do the Member States Compare?" can be read here.

Status Index 2011

The top rankings of the Status Index are dominated by northern European countries.^[1] At the same time, the leading group also includes New Zealand, with its Anglo-saxon heritage, and continental European Switzerland, two nations with different political and state welfare traditions.

The group of mid-range scorers (Canada, Australia, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, USA, Ireland, United Kingdom, Belgium, Austria, Czech Republic, France, Portugal, Japan, Chile, Spain, and Poland) and the lowest-ranking group (South Korea, Italy, Slovakia, Mexico, Greece, and Turkey) are geographically and culturally just as heterogeneous as the top group. Standard typologies in comparative political science are insufficient to explain the Status Index ranking of the OECD nations. For example, majoritarian democracies do not systematically score better or worse than consensus democracies. Classifying the countries as federalist and centralist states also fails to help explain the differences in reform capacity. The top group includes, above all, social democratic welfare states such as the Scandinavian countries. However, liberal welfare states also achieve high scores, with New Zealand, Switzerland and Canada in the upper mid-range. In general, the findings of the Status Index reveal higher scores among long-term, established OECD members – although there are exceptions: Chile, a new member, places in the lower midrange, while Italy and Greece rank significantly lower than some Eastern European countries. This suggests that the smaller, more open national economies tend to pursue especially sustainable policies.

See Status Index.

Management Index 2011

At the highest level of aggregation in the Management Index, the overview provides important initial indications of which countries exhibit the best performance of governance overall and which countries show deficiencies. Background information in greater depth on the performance of a given country can be found in the country reports on the SGI website. These include substantiated, qualitative information right down to the level of individual indicators.

The SGI Management Indicators are clearly led by Sweden and Norway, each with average scores exceeding 8 points.^[2] Next come Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Australia. While the overall ranking of northern European countries is again outstanding, as observed in the Status Index, this sequence also underscores the fact that no particular system type is favored in the Management Index. This top group is followed by a broad mid-range in which the changes in index scores are incremental, leaving no discernible clusters. Clearly bringing up the rear of the survey are Greece and Slovakia. Both countries trail Italy, which is 29th in the ranking, by nearly an entire point. The new OECD member Chile stands out positively, already scoring higher than some established, longstanding OECD states.