The OECD Public Integrity Indicators (OECD PII) establish a new benchmark for government resilience to corruption risks and provide guidance on how to strengthen public integrity. The OECD’s first-ever standard indicators on public integrity and anti-corruption have been developed for and with governments, based on the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Public Integrity . The scope of the Recommendation requires data collection from a wide range of actors across the executive, legislative and judiciary branches.
The OECD PII represent a new generation of indicators, which provide data to support concrete action against corruption, and allow countries to compare performance and identify best practices. The objective, evidence-based and actionable data of the platform helps decision-makers understand the strengths and weaknesses of national integrity systems, better allocate resources and target specific challenges. The OECD PII’s data and charts are downloadable, which can enrich further research and briefings to inspire better policies.
The framework establishes standard indicators for the preparedness and resilience of the public integrity system at the national level to prevent corruption, mismanagement and waste of public funds, and to assess the likelihood of detecting and mitigating various corruption risks by different actors in the system. The indicators combine sub-indicators establishing minimum legal, procedural and institutional safeguards for the independence, mandate and operational capability of essential actors in the integrity system with more outcome-oriented sub-indicators drawing on administrative data and surveys. The OECD has made efforts to take existing key performance indicators from national authorities, establish standard definitions to harmonise approaches and enable cross-country comparison.
The Indicators represent a dashboard instead of a ranking, rely on primary data rather than expert assessments and reports, and focus on actionable criteria and numerical rates. They fill a vacuum of reliable evidence on what steps governments should take to curb corruption risks, drawing on existing international normative frameworks from bodies such as the OECD, the United Nations, the European Union, and the Council of Europe. The purpose to identify the multiple steps that can be taken to strengthen core parts of the integrity system. Finally, the successful implementation of the indicators will help enhance the capacity of countries to measure corruption, corruption risks, effects of anti-corruption interventions and the resilience of the public integrity system and will provide an evidence-based approach to developing and implementing better integrity policies for better lives.
The indicators were developed by a Task Force consisting of nine members of the Working Party of Senior Public Integrity Officials to measure the successful implementation of the OECD Recommendation of the Council on Public Integrity. Task Force members came from Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, the Slovak Republic, and the United Kingdom. The indicators were approved by all OECD Member countries. A second task force consisting of members from Chile, Czechia, Finland, France, Greece, and the United States has since been convened to oversee the rollout of the indicators.
The OECD launched the first set of indicators on the quality of public integrity and anti-corruption strategies on 9 December 2021. Two more datasets have followed since and the next three datasets will be launched over the course of the next two years.
The OECD Public Integrity Indicators cover the following six areas:
Be part of the data-driven renewal of public integrity – use the data of the OECD PII to drive actionable change. Download the data here.