Canada topped the rankings based on its overall score for performance measures such as tax administration, policy making, inclusiveness, openness, integrity, crisis management, fiscal and financial management.

New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Norway, Korea and the U.S. rounded out the top 10 list, which represents the first-ever attempt to compare bureaucracies worldwide.

Among the lowest scoring bureaucracies were those in Slovakia, Hungary, Greece, Czechia, Italy, Portugal and Turkey.

Canada was praised for having a highly-educated government workforce with “a good representation of women, ethnic and religious groups.” ...

The study, known as the International Civil Service Effectiveness (InCiSE) Index, was prepared by researchers from Oxford University and the Institute for Government, a U.K. think tank.

The researchers assessed government bureaucracies from 31 countries on eight core functions and four key attributes. Data for the initial study was incomplete, the researchers warned, and will be refined in future years.

Canada was ranked third in the world for human resources management on the strength of its meritocratic hiring system, and also scored well on policy making and regulation. Its lowest ranking (20th) came in the area of tax administration — a reflection of the country’s relatively slow adoption of digital services.

Canada was among the top five nations for three of the four “attributes” measured: capability, integrity and inclusiveness. On the fourth attribute, openness, Canada’s civil service ranked 9th worldwide.

“Canada’s openness score, although well above the average, suggests there may be some lessons to learn from the leading countries concerning the right to information theme, as well as the availability and accessibility of government data,” the report concluded.

When researchers adjusted each country’s overall score based on GDP per capita, Canada’s civil service fell to fifth worldwide, behind top-ranked Estonia, Mexico, New Zealand and Korea...

...the study suggests too many Canadians take their civil service for granted. “And remember,” she said, “you have tens of thousands of public servants who have not been paid, or appropriately paid, and continue to show up at work with a sense of duty and service. So I think it’s particularly a good news story for all these wounded public servants.”...

This is excerpted from 10 July 2017 edition of The Ottawa Citizen.