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Indicators in Public Policy

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I
Indicators in Public Policy,
Brazil
Paulo Jannuzzi
National School of Statistics, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil
Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statisticas,
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Synonyms
Data and information; Evidences; Public statistics
Introduction
Indicator is a measure, in general, quantitative,
used to measure, approximate, or translate aspects
of social, economic, or environmental reality or
used to quantify the effort of allocating resources
or producing goods and services by public/private
organizations (United Nations 1989). Labor
income, infant mortality rate, gross domestic
product, and rate of forest deforestation are, in
this sense, indicators as they translate into tangible
and operational figures, relevant, specific, and
dynamic dimensions of the reality that surrounds
us. Hospital beds per thousand inhabitants, aver-
age daily caloric consumption, number of benefi-
ciaries of social protection programs, percentage
of households with access to basic sanitation are
also examples of indicators, allowing to
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. Farazmand (ed.), Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_3762-1
objectively estimate the availability of public/
private goods/services in a given location. Like
photographs, social, economic, and environmen-
tal indicators are approximate images of reality,
that is, they are simplified representations of it, the
better the more specific the aspects of interest in
portraying and the more reliable and accurate the
information used to calculate the measurements.
Like seismographs, policy or project indicators
inform the dynamics of the actions triggered by
the promoting agents and their potential effects.
Expressed as rates, indices, percentages or
absolute data, indicators make up the information
framework that Lindblom (1993) highlights in his
analysis of the decision-making process in public
policies in democratic contexts. Indicators reduce
uncertainties, assist in the debate with society,
subsidize decisions that are inexorably political
with technical information. These data subsidize
government planning activities in different
spheres of government; they make it possible for
the public authorities and civil society to monitor
the living conditions and well-being improve-
ment; they allow the deepening of academic
research on changes in society and to investigate
the determinants of the different phenomena that
occur in it (Haupt and Kane 2000).
Building an indicator involves a complex
methodological operation that begins with an
effort to clarify or objectify the concept or public
action of interest. Living conditions, labor pro-
ductivity, environmental sustainability are exam-
ples of complex constructs that can only be
2 Indicators in Public Policy, Brazil
“measured” if systematic efforts are done to
decode them into simpler concepts. Likewise, it
is not easier and immediate to propose indicators
to implement and evaluate public programs for
improving educational performance, encouraging
technological innovation or sustainable exploita-
tion of forests. The objectification of the concept
and proposition of an indicator is an interactive
process of concept-measurement: as soon as the
social phenomenon – or public action – is proxied
through preliminary versions of an indicator, its
analyses and use allow us to evaluate its validity
and go further into a new specification of concept –
or action – and propose other possible “approxi-
mate measures,” “proxies” or indicators
(Neufville 1975).
With a concept – or action – better specified,
one start to search for the information needed to
build the indicators. For this purpose, information
made available by statistical agencies, research
centers, universities and government agencies
are commonly used. These institutions carry out
sample surveys and demographic censuses on the
living conditions of the population, surveys and
panels of economic conjuncture with companies,
and research on the use of natural resources and
the state of the environment. Public registers,
public service records, government purchases,
and management systems are other sources of
relevant information to build indicators. For each
country, these data can be gathered by internet
tools or can be extracted from microdata files at
the statistical agencies and government websites
(such as www.ibge.gov.br or www.dados.gov.br
in Brazil). International indicators on many sub-
jects can be accessed at United Nations Statistical
Division (http://data.un.org/) or at one of UN spe-
cialized agency, according to the main area of
interest such as labor, education, health, food,
and development (which links are accessible by
the previous site).
It should be said that the available information
in official databases or statistical surveys may not
be suitable – in terms of conceptual specificity,
periodicity, population coverage – as desired to
compute the indicator that better “fits” the concept
someone is interested in. If it is not possible to
produce new data because of the cost and time
needed to it, the computable indicator may still be
useful as long as one knows its limitations in
terms of validity in representing the original con-
cept. The same idea applies if the information
lacks the desired reliability. The better the efforts
to produce consistent indicators, one should never
forget that they are proxies of reality, not reality
itself.
Besides the name and the computation method/
formula, indicator metadata – its documented
record – should also specify a more extended
definition of the measure, the data sources used,
geography and frequency it may the presented,
and comments on its taxonomy and properties
(WHO 2015). There are several ways to classify
indicators such as the broad thematic field – econ-
omy, society, and environment – public policy
programmatic sector – education, social protec-
tion, fiscal, health, labor indicators, etc. – program
implementation stage – context, input, output,
outcome indicators – or policy cycle phase – diag-
nosis, monitoring, and evaluation indicators. Lit-
erature in area presents also several properties on
indicators, such as validity – how close is the
measure to the addressed concept – reliability –
how confident are data used to compute it – cov-
erage – how representative it is of a segment or the
whole population – sensitiveness – how sensitive
it is to change over time or due to public interven-
tions – and intelligibility – how comprehensive it
is to the main users of the indicator (Jannuzzi
2017).
Indicators, Welfare State, and
International Agenda
The emergence and improvement of the field of
applied studies of social, economic, and environ-
mental indicators are intrinsically linked to the
structuring of the social welfare state and to the
consolidation of public sector planning activities
throughout the twentieth century (Desrosieres
1998). As economic indicators were first
demanded – to measure international trade, eco-
nomic production, and unemployment levels due
to 1929 crisis – social measures appeared more
recently, having gained technical-scientific body
Indicators in Public Policy, Brazil
in the mid-1960s, in the attempts to organize more
comprehensive systems to monitor social changes
and gauge the impact of social policies around the
world (Atkinson et al. 2005). The production of
environment indicators became more common in
the nineties, as ecological questions entered on
public agenda.
There are certainly previous contributions to
the construction of a conceptual framework on
social indicators, such as the studies by sociolo-
gist Emile Durkheim in the first decades of the last
century or even earlier, as suggested by Neufville
(1975). She argues that although “social indica-
tor” became the dominant term in the 1960s, “sta-
tistics” as a practice for quantifying social
phenomena for public decision-making dates
back to the seventeenth century, with the work
of Englishman William Petty. But it was in the
middle of the “thirty golden years of capitalism”
that the indicators gain prominence. In the post-
war period and in the following decade, there was
great interest in proposing more complex eco-
nomic indicators, framed in systems of national
accounts, to produce better and international com-
parable estimates of gross domestic product
(GDP). But, in several countries, despite the
increase in GDP, high levels of poverty remained
and social inequalities were accentuated. Eco-
nomic growth proved to not a sufficient condition
to guarantee social development (Carley 1985). In
the now-developed countries, social indicators
were needed to monitor social change and to
evaluate the growing scope of public policies
and government expenditure. The management
of welfare state policies – on health, housing,
labor, social assistance, education, etc. –
demanded newer statistics to produce indicators
to policy making, monitoring, and evaluation.
In this context, an immense conceptual and
methodological effort was made to develop instru-
ments for measuring well-being and social change
in statistical agencies in different countries, under
the auspices of multilateral institutions such as the
United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD), the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), and the various other
agencies of the United Nations System. The pub-
lication of the books “Social Indicators,” by Bauer
3
(1966), and “Toward a Social Report” (USA
1969), made by American government’s order,
represented important milestones in this process,
inaugurating what would later be called, at the
time, in the mid-1960s of “Movement of Social
Indicators” (Miles 1985).
The development of indicators technical field
was also stimulated by United Nations’ 10-year
development agendas. As Koehler (2016)
observes, these agendas established by the United
Nations Assembly proposed quantitative targets
for economic growth and, gradually, broadened
the scope to include measures of social welfare for
the world and developing countries. In the second
“Development Decade” of the United Nations, in
the 1970s, besides the goals toward economic
growth, it was included commitments for
advances on employment, education, health, and
nutrition policies. In the 1980s, the United
Nations began to focus the fight against hunger
and poverty as fundamental objectives of the
international agenda, and since then this commit-
ment has not been withdrawn. The UN World
Conferences in the 1990s, the publication of
Human Development Reports, and other social
reports organized by civil society organizations
summed up to create a second “Indicators Move-
ment.” Proposals of newer indicators – in such
news areas as cultural diversity, human rights, and
environment – emerged during those ten world
conferences concerning education (1990), child-
hood (1990), environment (1992), human rights
(1993), population (1994), social development
(1995), women (1995), human settlements
(1996), youth (1998), and racial discrimination
(2001).
Such efforts on public policy commitments –
and therefore, on indicators – contributed to estab-
lish the Millennium Development Goals (MDG)
agenda, that emerged from the “Millennium Sum-
mit” in 2000, in which leaders from 191 countries
participated. However, reflecting the hegemonic
liberal perspective on State role at that time in the
world, the development agenda was reduced to a
more modest set of commitments, frustrating the
encouraging expectations of social progress that
had been built in the past decades. Even though,
the international and political legitimation of the
4 Indicators in Public Policy, Brazil
agenda and the compromise to monitor the eight
development goals represented a new impetus for
the field of indicators in the world. It was neces-
sary to produce and make available consistent
indicators, on a regular basis, to monitor the pro-
gress over the years. Less developed countries
were mobilized to improve their statistical system
and produce social reports as a way to measure
their performance on the commitments such as
reducing extreme poverty in 2015 to half of that
observed in 1990, universalizing primary educa-
tion, eliminating gender gaps in access to educa-
tion, or reducing childhood mortality to two-third
of the prevailing in 1990 (Koehler 2016).
At the end of the 2000s, Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi
Commission brought relevant contributions to the
area, proposing new measures of economic per-
formance, social progress, and sustainable devel-
opment (Stiglitz et al. 2014). It might be said that
the commission reports marked the beginning of
the third wave of the “Indicators Movement.” But
the most eloquent evidence of this new move-
ment – or its peak – would be configured with
the proposal of more than 230 indicators to mon-
itor the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)
agenda, in mid-2015. The SDG agenda enlarged
the minimalist development perspective of the
previous one, a frequent criticism of non-
governmental organizations to the MDGs
(Mertens 2016). After decades of predominance
of liberal ideas in public management, SDG
agenda brought back the relevance of State and
broader public policies.
SDG agenda conceives development as a pro-
cess that should simultaneously ensure economic
growth, social inclusion, and environmental sus-
tainability, a triad-concept discussed and vali-
dated during the 2012 International Conference
on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro
(RIO + 20). So, it is a broader proposal, including
all countries, dedicated to promote public policies
and induce the private sector to achieve more than
160 commitments, gathered in 17 major objec-
tives. If it is true that the effort to monitor the
MDG agenda has left an important legacy of a
minimum set of around 60 comparable interna-
tional indicators, the enlarged commitments scope
brings a challenging work agenda to statistical
system all over the world. A quick examination
of the 200 established indicators – of a set five
times larger, when the discussions on the agenda
started in 2010 – reveals that there are still many
information gaps to be solved in the statistical
systems, even to developed countries, specially
on environment indicators.
Most of the countries have been working on
SDG set of indicators as it can be seen, in Brazil-
ian case, at its SDG platform (https://odsbrasil.
gov.br/) The international progress toward this
third Indicators Movement can be seen at SDG
website (https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/).
Indicators and the Public Policy Cycle
Public policies are information-intensive bodies.
Policies are complex systems proposed to attend
collective needs or solve public problems. In order
to do it, policies involve the proposal of regulation
laws, universal coverage programs linked to redis-
tributive ones in many sectorial areas. They are
operated by agents at different government levels,
with distinct management skills, to deliver several
kinds of products, services, and cash transfers to
diverse target groups in many places in the coun-
try (Subirats and Dente 2014). Thus, in such com-
plexity, program design and implementation
require many indicators to fill diagnosis studies,
build monitoring systems, and subsidize results
evaluation. In fact, indicators are indispensable
inputs in all phases of the policy cycle, from
formulation to evaluation (Jann and Wegrich
2007).
In order to promote a particular public issue on
the priority policy agenda, the first stage of the
policy cycle, it is necessary to have indicators that
dimension and characterize the phenomenon.
Indicators play a fundamental role in the objecti-
fication and dimensioning of latent collective
issues in society that, properly vocalized, can
enter into government’s priority agenda. In this
sense, indicators instrumentalize the demands of
political parties, unions, employers’ associations,
the press, and other institutions. By modeling
problems such as hunger, poverty, poor school
performance, difficulties in accessing health
Indicators in Public Policy, Brazil
services, drug addiction, violence, and several
other inequities, the indicators contribute to the
discussion of the priorities of the government and
corporate agenda in the country (Jannuzzi 2016).
The better these issues are dimensioned and char-
acterized through structured information, the
more arguments are provided to pressure groups,
government, and society to discuss priorities and
public budgetary allocation.
In the formulation of the public policy, indica-
tors are needed to describe various themes of
social reality. After all, it is necessary to have a
multifaceted diagnosis about the living conditions
to subsequently guide the design of the programs
to be implemented. Good diagnostic indicators are
characterized by the ability to explain the social
issue or to discriminate against typical situations
in which this issue manifests itself in population
groups or territories, in a given period of time.
In the implementation phase, a monitoring set
of indicators are needed. This set should be
parsimonious and be organized as an input-
output-outcome logic to allow monitoring pro-
gram operations and its possible effects
(McDavid and Hawthorn 2006). This monitoring
framework makes possible to track how human,
financial and physical resources are being used,
how fast the products and services are being deliv-
ered and, finally, if possible, how programs are
changing people lives. For this purpose, monitor-
ing indicators should be sensitive to program
activities and its deliveries and, of course, be
available in regular basis.
In the evaluation stage, several indicators
should be used in order to analyze to what extent
the programmatic actions contributed to the miti-
gation of the collective problems pointed out in
the diagnosis. Is it the time to have indicators that
account for effectiveness (has the program met its
objectives?), efficiency (have the resources been
well used?), and impact (what are other effects
generated by the program on beneficiaries and on
society?). Indicators for evaluating purposes need
to be specific and sensitive to their various pro-
grammatic components, to show effects – lack of
effects or even defects – when there is reason to
suspect that they have been produced (Rossi
et al. 2004).
5
The Political Nature of the Indicators
In technocratic circles, indicators are seen as a
powerful resource to legitimize public policy
decisions, due to the apparent impartiality they
would hold (Porter 1996). In this sense, they con-
fer political authority on those who do not directly
hold it by vote or delegation. But, if it is a fact that
indicators bring evidence to support political deci-
sions, they do not have the power to refer them
without question. As Miles (1985) warned a few
decades ago, indicators cannot be understood as
neutral instruments, free from ideological or polit-
ical values. Indicators illuminate aspects that its
proponents want to highlight, in the perspective
that they consider relevant. There are always dif-
ferent interpretations that can be made about a
single set of indicators or even, alternative indica-
tors can be proposed to defend a certain position
or another, with greater or lesser analytical
strength.
Like any technical resource, indicators can be
used constructively or irresponsibly. They can
inform or misinform. Good use generates relevant
knowledge for analyzing social change or govern-
ment action. Misuse or abuse produces mis-
information or factoid, under apparent technical
varnish. They can contribute to improving poli-
cies and programs or be employed to
delegitimize them.
Social indicators, economic statistics, and
environmental data are public goods; they are
not divisible goods, in which consumption by
some limits the use by others. So, their use should
be encouraged and subsidized. The more intense
they are used by public institutions, private com-
panies, and civil society, better the benefits for all
in forming consensus on how to face collective
demands and to improve well-being.
Cross-References
▶ Brazil
▶ Evidence-Based Policy Making
▶ Statistical Capacity
6 Indicators in Public Policy, Brazil
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