The approach to evaluating public policies based on the rational model, with an emphasis on policy performance and results, is widely used in academia and contemporary governments. Below, we present the application of the input-output model, a traditional approach in public policy analysis and business administration, to assess the efficiency of Brazilian spending abroad, creating a quantitative measure for evaluating the country’s diplomatic representations.

The method chosen to assess the performance of Brazilian diplomatic representations is Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The method is used to estimate efficiency based on the comparison between similar units (DMUs – Decision Making Units), consuming similar resources (inputs) to produce the same products or results (outputs). In our case, the DMUs are the diplomatic representations of Brazil abroad, structuring the panel data by country and year.

Different types of DEA models have been developed in the literature to address different assumptions, data structures, and research objectives. Since our data structure is panel data, we apply the Dynamic DEA model, which was developed for this type of data structuring. Dynamic DEA allows the evaluation of efficiency in systems where past decisions affect future performance by modeling intertemporal dependencies (e.g., current diplomatic investments impact future bilateral relations).

The fundamental output of the proposed evaluation model is the Foreign Policy Index (FPI), assuming the objective of Brazilian foreign policy to increase or maintain engagement with countries. On the input side, we used expenditures on diplomatic representations, expenditures on diplomatic personnel, and the number of diplomatic staff assigned to the country’s diplomatic representations. The time series covers 2013 to 2022, 110 countries. Below we present the results of the diplomatic efficiency index created by the dynamic DEA analysis, ranging from 0 to 1, where 1 is the highest relative efficiency. 

Below we present the dynamic map with the diplomatic efficiency index data for the entire time series. Countries in white on the map do not have data (they generally do not have diplomatic representations or have had relations suspended with Brazil). The more intense the color on the map below, the greater the efficiency of the diplomatic representations in the country.

Next, we make the efficiency index data available in a spreadsheet for download. At the end of this page you will find the disaggregated data for replicating the DEA analysis, with the codes in R and a dynamic bar map to visualize the data according to the available filters.