Publications & Documents

The 2024 edition of Government at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean provides the latest available evidence on public administrations and their performance in the LAC region and compares it to OECD countries. It includes indicators on trust in public institutions and satisfaction with public services, as well as evidence on good governance practices in areas such as the policy cycle, budgeting, public procurement, infrastructure planning and delivery, regulatory governance, digital government and open government data. Finally, it provides information on what resources public institutions use and how they are managed, including public finances, public employment, and human resources management. Government at a Glance allows for cross-country comparisons and helps identify trends, best practices, and areas for improvement in the public sector. 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 of the data, and a methodological section on the definition of the indicator and any limitations in data comparability.

Rising disinformation has far-reaching consequences in many policy areas ranging from public health to national security. It can cast doubt on factual evidence, jeopardise the implementation of public policies and undermine people's trust in the integrity of democratic institutions. This report explores how to respond to these challenges and reinforce democracy. It presents an analytical framework to guide countries in the design of policies, looking at three complementary dimensions: implementing policies to enhance the transparency, accountability, and plurality of information sources; fostering societal resilience to disinformation; and upgrading governance measures and public institutions to uphold the integrity of the information space.

Since 2014, the Flemish government has undertaken a series of reforms of its budgetary system, including the implementation of performance-informed budgeting, which includes both the implementation of spending reviews and performance budgeting. The aim of the reforms is to better integrate policy development and resource allocation and improve the accountability and transparency of the Flemish public sector. This report takes stock of performance-informed budgeting practices in Flanders. It provides an assessment of their key strengths and highlights where improvements can be made. Finally, it includes recommendations to further strengthen the approach to performance-informed budgeting in Flanders.

In many countries, public expenditure, including transfers, plays a major role in reducing income inequality. The report reviews the various ways that budgeting can be used to this end. A first includes taking a broad approach to results-based budgeting, taking social and distributional goals into consideration. A second relies on integrating distributional impact analysis directly into the budget process. The report discusses the concrete experience of eight OECD countries in this area, analysing how they are integrating distributional impact assessment in spending and budgeting decisions. Finally, it discusses the tools, frameworks and data that are needed to take distributional considerations into account as part of evidence-informed policy making.