Social Development with Public Value: An International Comparison

Abstract

AbstractSocial development around the world has been stunted by the lack of a comprehensive understanding and definition of public value. Public value theory can provide guidance, and inform a universal standard for social development. However, it is difficult to define and measure public value due to its philosophical complexity. Public values are driven by various economic, political, and social forces, and can be created by many stakeholders including enterprises, governments and non-governmental organisations. Government is central to human society and is primarily responsible for inclusive social development, which requires setting and maintaining public values orderly and synchronously according to the plurality of views held by those in society. Social development failure may occur when some key public values are ignored. This study uses thirty economic, social, and political indicators to measure public value, and the results demonstrate strong correlations among them. Through a principal component analysis and a cluster analysis, these thirty indicators can be reduced to four principal components. The first one, which represents economic value, can explain 65.8% of the total information, identifying that economic value is playing a fundamental role among plural public values. Countries are clustered and their development neighbors are identified in order to compare countries with similar levels of development. Public value theory can help to understand the advantages and disadvantages of different countries, and advance the social and economic progress steadily and authentically.