The Australian Public Service (APS) has been ranked fifth best Public Service in the world by a School of Government at Oxford University and British think tank, the Institute for Government.
The Institute’s International Civil Service Effectiveness Index (InCiSE) evaluated 38 Public Services from across the globe, declaring the United Kingdom’s Civil Service to be the best at No. 1 and Hungary’s the least at No. 38.
Australia’s 2019 ranking of No. 5 follows its 2017 rating as No. 3 in the world after Canada and New Zealand.
This year Australia was beaten by the UK (1), New Zealand (2), Canada (3) and Finland (4) and followed by Denmark (6) Norway (7) Holland (8), South Korea (9) and Sweden (10).
According to the organisers the index was aimed to assess how effectively Public Services around the world performed and to identify in which areas their strengths lie relative to their international counterparts.
The index measures 11 ‘core functions’ described as “the key things a civil service does” and six ‘attributes’ seen as “the main characteristics of a civil service that can drive what they do”.
“Some interesting trends can be observed in the 2019 report,” the organisers said.
“The four Commonwealth countries in the Index (Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK) rank in the top five (and) the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden) are also placed highly, with all but Iceland in the top 10,” they said.
“The remaining countries of northern and western Europe tend to rank more highly than countries in southern and eastern Europe (and) countries from outside Europe are distributed throughout the ranking.”
They said the index was designed to be used as a performance improvement tool to enable senior public service leaders find out which countries performed best in which areas and learn from them, and as an accountability tool allowing citizens, Government officials and politicians find out how well their Public Service was working.
The Institute’s 90-page Index can be accessed at this PS News link.
