SCORECARD

The Prime Minister and the Government are committed to making improvements to the lives of the Moldovan citizens. Previously, the State Chancellery was monitoring mainly how the public institutions were implementing the actions from the Government Program, developing new laws or programs. This approach was not sufficient. The Prime Minister and the Government need information about how all these laws and programs are making the actual improvements on the front-line and if the citizens and businesses feel them. And this is the information that the Scorecard brings. The Government wants to transparently communicate these results to the citizens through this website and will update it regularly.

It addition to publishing the Scorecard for the public on this website, it is an actual internal tool for tracking the implementation of reforms. The public institutions send the data to the State Chancellery every quarter. The progress on results indicators is first discussed with the technical staff from ministries and then in a meeting chaired by the Prime Minister with the Heads of relevant institutions. The good progress is recognized, and where the progress is lagging, decisions are taken on what needs to be done to do things better and faster.

Currently, the Scorecard covers three reform areas selected in collaboration between the State Chancellery, civil society representatives, World Bank team.  The three dimensions and the list of indicators for each of them, have been endorsed by the State Chancellery through a Note at the end of 2016 and it is envisaged that a Government Decision will be adopted at a later state to institutionalize the approach. The three dimensions include: doing business, social assistance and pensions, and public administration reform. Each of these areas includes specific reform sub-areas with initiatives that are currently implemented. For example, the set of reforms to make it easier to do business in Moldova includes improvements in getting the permits, complying with state inspections, paying taxes, importing and exporting etc.

After the selection of the reform areas was completed, the task was to identify the appropriate indicators went to the Working Groups (WG), created for each area. They included representatives from sector relevant Central Public Administration Authorities. The WG members first selected the sub-areas and based on their set-out objectives, prioritized around 15 indicators in total. This means, that the indicator coverage of a reform area is not comprehensive, as one would find in a strategic plan of a ministry for example, but it selects a set of indicators based on prioritization criteria. These include, for example, the relevance to reform objectives, relevance from the point of view of citizens, already existing indicators used by ministries to collect data and report on, data availability with higher frequency etc. The Scorecard is thus selective on purpose, in order to provide the Government with the most relevant information and not to create a significant administrative burden on the institutions.

The score represents the overall level of progress on the reforms in a certain area. So, for example, if the score is 77%, it means that the overall performance on reaching the reform objectives is 77%.  What does that mean? Lets say the Government wants to make paying taxes easier for citizens and firms. It wants to do so by making the appropriate changes in the law, setting up an IT system through which the taxpayers can submit taxes online, running an information campaign to provide information and boost the use of the online system etc. It defines what the achievement of the objective should look like – for example, to increase the share of tax declarations submitted online to 70% or to reduce the time taxpayers spend paying taxes to 165 hours annually, by 2021. The score thus can be imagined as an index, which puts together the progress on all of these indicators collectively, expressed through their distance from a set out target. All indicators have equal weight in the score.

The data comes both from the Moldovan public institutions (National Statistical Office, ministries and agencies), as well as national and international surveys (Public Opinion Barometer or World Bank Cost of Doing Business) and indexes (World Bank Governance Indicators).

It is updated at least quarterly. The data for about half of the indicators is collected on quarterly basis, the rest are annual indicators.

The Scorecard updates and reviews are managed by a dedicated team at the  [Owner]. While the [Owner] is ultimately in charge of the final product that the Prime Minister gets and that is published on this website, the content is a collective work of all the experts from the ministries, agencies, non-governmental and donor organizations, that provide data and expertise on various technical solutions to get improvements on the results. The ultimate responsibility for the results lies with the Government.

For meaningful data comparability, it is of course good to keep the same indicators for as long as possible. But, at the same time, the Scorecard needs to stay relevant to the reforms, their objectives and level of ambition, that the Government is pursuing. So when strategies get updated, so should the Scorecard. The Government Decision on monitoring the priority reforms through the Scorecard (GD) sets out a clear process for how and with what frequency any of these changes can be done.

The NGOs were invited to participate in the WGs and several of them got actively involved in the selection of indicators and the quarterly reviews of data. According to the methodology, the NGOs can comment on progress and request the reviews of data, if necessary. Significant updates of the Scorecard content need to be validated by the NGO members of the WGs. The World Bank provided technical support to the development of the Scorecard and the UK Embassy supported the initiative financially through the DFID Good Governance Fund.