Measuring state capacity across advanced and emerging economies

State capacity is easy to invoke and hard to measure. In our current comparative study we treat it as the ability of an administration to implement a stated decision — to collect a tax, register a business, or deliver a service — and to do so predictably.

Three measurable components

We separate the concept into components that can each be observed:

1. Fiscal reach — the share of economic activity a state can assess and collect.
2. Administrative reliability — how consistently a routine transaction is completed within a stated time.
3. Information — whether the state holds the records needed to act at all.

Each component is imperfect on its own. Together they let us compare systems that look very different on paper but perform similarly in practice.

What the comparison shows

Across the 38 economies in the current sample, the gap between advanced and emerging administrations is narrower on reliability than on fiscal reach. Several middle-income systems complete routine transactions as consistently as far wealthier ones; the difference shows up in what they can finance, not in whether the counter is staffed.

The finding is provisional. We publish the underlying indicators alongside the report so that others can weight the components differently and see whether the ranking holds.