How has government effectiveness changed in different OECD countries over the past decade? Government effectiveness and public spending; government effectiveness and COVID mortality

We start by building an overall indicator of government effectiveness for OECD countries, based on various indicators relating to health, education, justice and security, the labour market, poverty and innovation. We then compare, for each OECD country, the government effectiveness indicator calculated in 2011, 2016 and 2021. This enables us to identify: Countries where government effectiveness has improved: the United States, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Australia; Countries where government effectiveness has remained stable: Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Austria and Japan; Countries where government effectiveness has deteriorated: France, Italy, the Netherlands and Greece. We then compare changes in government effectiveness with changes in the weight of public spending. We see that there is no relationship: increasing public spending does not increase government effectiveness . Last, we compare the level of government effectiveness and the mortality rate due to COVID; we see that countries with low government effectiveness are those with high mortality.