Governance statistics in OECD countries and beyond : what exists, and what would be required to assess their quality?

The paper provides a first assessment of the range of governance statistics that are available in OECD countries, reaching three main conclusions. First, while several statistics relating to various aspects of governance are already available, they differ in terms of the underlying concepts, the labels used to describe them, the range of institutions covered, and the detailed aspect or function considered: developing a common conceptual framework for governance is hence a prerequisite for gathering more robust and useful statistics in this field. Second, efforts should be devoted to thoroughly assess the quality of existing governance statistics, as a preliminary step towards providing general advice to statistical producers and users: the model currently used by the OECD with respect to measuring “trust”, based on an assessment of the reliability and validity of existing measures, could be usefully extended to other aspects of governance. Third, while politically sensitive, there are no a priori reasons why NSOs should consider governance statistics as falling outside their remit; these statistics should become part of their routine production, subject to the same quality standards and requirements that apply to other social, economic and environmental statistics.