Public policies aim to improve outcomes such as life expectancy, the cognitive skills of children or housing conditions for low-income households. An important question is how to prioritise the goals. This question has recently become more acute, as many Western governments are facing the pressure of ageing populations and increased demand for expensive welfare state provisions. At the same time, there are vast differences in the way public sectors are organised. Against this background, it is useful to compare the performance of countries in several public sector policy areas and to assess how this has changed in recent years. In the first part of this e-report, we compare five policy areas - education, health, housing, social security and public administration - across the 28 EU Member States, Norway and Switzerland. We also briefly compare European performance with that of Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and the United States. In the second part, we take a closer look at the individual policy areas.

Northern Europe on average outperforms other European regions in education, health, housing, social security and public administration.

To measure performance in a given area, we combine the outcome indicators for the area in a composite index.[1] This yields separate indices for education, health, housing, social security and public administration. Figure 1 contains the index scores of the EU-28, Norway and Switzerland for each policy area, as well as average scores per region. They show that the countries in Northern Europe on average perform best across all five areas, followed by the countries in Western Europe. By contrast, the countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Southern Europe score below average across all areas, except health, where Southern Europe performs exceptionally well. Central and Eastern Europe attains the lowest average scores for education, health, housing and public administration, while Southern Europe records the lowest scores for social security. The figures also show that the regional averages mask considerable differences between countries in the same region, especially in Central and Eastern Europe.

Figure 1 does not include Eastern Asia (Japan and Korea), Northern America (Canada and the United States) and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) because data for these regions are available only for education, health and public administration. When looking at these policy areas, we observe that Japan and Korea on average outperform all other regions in education and health. However, in public administration, they score just below average. Australia and New Zealand have average scores which are comparable to those of Western Europe and somewhat below those of Northern Europe. Finally, the performance of Canada and the United States is also similar to that of Western Europe in education and public administration. However, in health they score considerably lower on average.

Notes: Higher scores correspond to better performance. A score of 0.00 (+1.00) implies that the performance was equal to (1 standard deviation above) the average performance in a reference group of 24 EU Member States (see Chapter 9 of Public sector achievement in 36 countries for details).
Sources: Eurostat, OECD, UNODC, EU-SILC, World Bank, SCP treatment.