Reproducibility package for Institutional Capacity For Policy Implementation: An Analytical Framework

State capacity is an important pre-requisite for policy implementation, yet at the country-level it is difficult to measure, assess, and reform. We propose a focus on institutional capacity: the ability of public institutions to implement the specific policy mandates for which they are responsible. Based on a review of existing literature, we define the different dimensions that compose institutional capacity and group them into two cross-cutting categories: organizational dimensions (personnel, financial resources, information systems, and management practices) and governance dimensions (transparency, independence, and accountability). We propose measures for organizational and governance dimensions using existing data, show intra-institutional variation of these measures within countries, and discuss how new data could be collected to better measure these concepts. Finally, we illustrate how the framework can be used to diagnose the sources of common problems of weak policy implementation.