Developing a decentralisation index for the Committee of the Regions Division of Powers Portal

The Decentralisation Index is intended to become an integral part of the Division of Powers (DoP) portal developed by the CoR. The DoP provides detailed information on the governance structures and competences of different levels of governments across the Member States, candidate and potential candidate countries as well as Eastern Partnership and Southern Neighbourhood Area countries. It also includes information on how competences across different policy fields are shared among governance structures. The portal provides qualitative information on horizontal aspects of governance such as subsidiarity and relations with EU institutions. It was extended and updated in 2016, integrating additional information such as fiscal decentralisation and then revised again in 2019 for the EU countries. The DoP is also an ongoing work, and the CoR is seeking to further develop its accessibility and the value of the information available on the portal. Against this background, this study has the following objectives, which are closely interlinked: to propose and test an approach for developing a decentralisation index for three dimensions of decentralisation (i.e., fiscal, political and administrative), building on existing data (mainly from the DoP) and publicly available data from other sources; to provide a tentative structure for the graphic representation of the index per country and over time; to explore ways to better structure and quantify the existing information in some of the sections of the DoP.