“Measuring the quality of government and sub-national variation” 
This project began with being awarded a grant (with Victor Lapuente and Bo Rothstein) for 500,000 Euros to write a study on QoG within the 27 countries of the European Union. The project, funded by the EU Commission’s Regional Policy Department . Below you can dowload the full report, and several current papers from it along with the data. We are currently working with Edward Elgar publishing company (UK) on a book of the project (forthcoming 2012)
Project overview:
There is much variation with respect to social and economic development within and across EU countries. Many possible explanations have been suggested for such variation, ranging from cumulative causation and macro-economic conditions to brain drain. One additional explanation for faltering economic and social development is that the ‘quality of government’ (QoG) is not sufficiently strong. Although a recent proliferation of QoG data have emerged since the mid 1990s, no quantification of the quality of government has been created or used in this process so far at the regional level. Thus the primary task of this project was to create such data. Based on the combination of national level international expert assessments from the World Bank and the largest QoG survey to date to focus on regional variation, we construct the most complete quantitative estimates of QoG variation for all 27 EU countries and 172 NUTS 1 and NUTS 2 regions within 18 countries which are highly robust to a wide array of sensitivity tests. We complement these quantitative findings with ten in-depth case studies in order to elucidate common characteristics in high and low QoG regions throughout the EU to provide the most systematic analysis of QoG in this region to date.
Download the full report:
Final report – parts 1-3 (concept & data analysis); Final report – part 4 (case studies); Full Appendix and References
This report was part of the EU Commission’s tri-annual “Cohesion Report”. For a look at this report, along with the other reports that went into the EU Cohesion report 2010, please go to the following web address – The report can be found here:
the Quality of Government Data’.
Dr. Nicholas Charron 