In the reform of further improving the market economy, we must pay attentions to government supervision, since it is the only way to ensure that the citizens enjoy high quality services and products. The essence to guarantee ahigh quality is to improve the supervision ability of the government. The ability building of government supervision can be realized by exploring the common grounds of those supervision institutions of strong ability. In the existing studies, the scholars from different fields designed various index to evaluate supervision ability. However, most designs remain at the theoretical stage other than be put into practice. The few experimental studies on supervision ability merely target at economic regulators like China Banking Regulatory Commission and China Securities Regulatory Commission. Due to the large discrepancy on theoretical basis, policy purpose, instrument and targets between economic and social regulators, the index system for economic supervision ability cannot be directly applied in social regulators. As a result, there is a lack of experimental study on the supervision ability of social regulators. For the above reason, this paper aims to build an index system for supervision ability of social regulators to compare the ability of the regulators, and then put forward some policy suggestions for the improvement of supervision ability.

Through a review of the existing study on the concepts and factors of supervision ability, this paper builds a supervision ability grading system under the OECD analysis framework. In the system, the supervision ability consists of supervision institution construction, supervision instrument usage and supervision policy quality. To testify the grading system, this paper uses the Ministry of Environmental Protection, China Food and Drug Administration and the Center of Inspection and Supervision, National Health and Family Planning Commission as experiment subjects. The supervision abilities of these three regulators were graded based on the second hand data and materials in 2013. According to the results,the Ministry of Environmental Protection ranks first, and China Food and Drug Administration ranks second. Generally speaking, the supervision ability is quite weak: the independency is low, the power is decentralized, the instrument is inefficient and the policy quality is not high enough. This finding suggests that the supervision ability of the social regulators should be improved in terms of the institution construction, instrument usage and policy quality.