Government at a Glance: Southeast Asia 2025: Brunei Darussalam
Table of contents
Southeast Asia (SEA) has achieved remarkable development gains over recent decades, with strong economic growth improving livelihoods and expanding access to essential services. Nonetheless, the region faces pressing challenges, including rapid urbanisation, climate change, unequal opportunities and the impact of the digital transformation. Sustaining progress requires efficient public institutions, capable of managing the evolving fiscal, social, environmental and technological challenges of the 21st century. Government at a Glance: Southeast Asia 2025 provides insights to help the region’s public institutions enhance governance and improve service delivery. The report is a joint publication of the OECD and Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Governments across the SEA region, as in OECD countries and elsewhere in the world, made significant expenditures during the early 2020s to help businesses and the public cope with the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The costs of providing support contributed to sharp increases in budget deficits. In Brunei the budget deficit widened from 3.7% of GDP in 2019 to 15.8% of GDP in 2020, before recovering to a deficit of 10.9% of GDP in 2023.
To build prosperity and resilience to shocks, and support long-term national development, public finances across the region would benefit from further reform to place them on a more sustainable footing. Governments will need to ensure that public financial management and budgeting processes support efficient allocation of public resources and constraints on budgetary aggregates. Improving domestic revenue mobilisation would also support sound fiscal frameworks and provide additional resources.
General government gross debt levels in the SEA region rose from 44% of GDP in 2019 to 58% in 2023. In Brunei the debt increased from 2.6% in 2019 to 2.9% in 2020. Between 2020 and 2023 the debt started decreasing again to 2.3% of GDP.
Expanding availability and usage of digital public services is an area for SEA countries to strengthen. In seven out of eight SEA countries, less than 50% of public services are accessible online through digital identity. In Brunei, 25% or less of the population eligible to create a digital identity to access public services have done so.
SEA countries (2023) and OECD countries (2022)
Governments can improve their agility and policy impact by putting digital transformation at the heart of modernisation efforts. The OECD Digital Government Index (DGI) benchmarks digital government policies and their implementation. The average DGI score for SEA countries was 0.37 out of 1 at the end of 2023. This is somewhat below the average across OECD Member countries of 0.61. There is scope for governments across the region to improve on anticipating user needs, and on their use of data and artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver public policies and services. Brunei had a score of 0.3 on the DGI in 2023, which is below the regional average.
The Open, Useful and Re-usable data (OURdata) Index assesses how effectively governments develop and implement open data strategies, engage stakeholders in data sharing and re-use, and ensure that key datasets are publicly available. The average OURdata score for SEA countries was 0.22, below the OECD average of 0.48. Brunei has a score of 0.05 on the OURData Index, which is below the regional average. There is room for improvement in the SEA region, supporting access, security, availability and re-use of open government data.
Government at a Glance: Southeast Asia 2025 presents the most up-to-date internationally comparable data on how public administrations function and perform in SEA countries, and includes comparison to OECD member countries in the Asia Pacific region and to the OECD average. Data included in the factsheets are derived from the Government at a Glance report. The factsheets do not provide a comprehensive picture of public governance performance, but rather a snapshot of key indicators across the topics covered in the publication: public finance; budgeting; governance of infrastructure; digital government; and public services.
This work is published under the responsibility of the Secretary-General of the OECD. The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein do not necessarily reflect the official views of the Member countries of the OECD.
This document, as well as any data and map included herein, are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area.
The statistical data for Israel are supplied by and under the responsibility of the relevant Israeli authorities. The use of such data by the OECD is without prejudice to the status of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem and Israeli settlements in the West Bank under the terms of international law.
The full book is available in English: OECD (2025), Government at a Glance: Southeast Asia 2025, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/bc89cb32-en.
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