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How to Measure Public Administration Performance
Abstract and Figures
The economic crisis provides some insights on the role of measurement systems. As shown by the ongoing discussion of credit rating agencies by political actors and in the news media, measurement is not a neutral device, but an active agent in societal processes. Comparative measurements of international public administration are as frail, technocratic, and overly aggregated as bond ratings, but nonetheless are increasingly used by journalists, aid organizations, foreign investors, and, indeed, rating agencies to hold governments accountable. Better measurement is needed in public administration performance. This article builds on study reports from the OECD's Government at a Glance project to address the issue of how to measure public administration performance. The fields of budgeting, human resources management, and open government illustrate both the potential and the challenge of such measurements.
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... Structuring human resources Maximizing human resources Building a cathedral required a lot of people with specialized knowledge, money, and time, according to reference [29], just like launching a spaceship did. Since its construction was authorized in 1994, it took until December 2017 for its primary mirror to become 100% active. ...
... Building a cathedral required a lot of people with specialized knowledge, money, and time, according to the reference [29], just like launching a spaceship did. Since its construction was authorized in 1994, it took until December 2017 for its primary mirror to reach 100% activity, and it is possible that as technology develops and potential changes or unfortunate events occur, there are a number of important factors that will make that, despite the delay, whether in construction, a lack of resources, or operational issues, the willingness of stakeholders to work together, Among these components are control, monitoring, the use of best practices, strategic planning, and openness. ...
Research was conducted for the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT), a joint project between the US and Mexico. A Balanced Scorecard (BSC) was created based on the approach suggested by Niven in 2008. Eleven indicators and seven strategic objectives were noted, and a performance measure, goal, type of monitoring, and data collection technology were suggested for each indication. The outcomes demonstrated that the BSC provides a cause-and-effect link in all observatory operations and a framework that is adaptable to the particulars of the observatory.
... Far from denying this approach in which the advantages are numerous, we believe that one should pay more attention to the need for measurements of other nonfinancial parameters, for which the levels determine the long-term development not only of the organisation itself but also, in the case of public administration, of municipalities, communes, or entire regions. As Van Van Dooren et al. (2012) noted "the development of performance indicators for public administration requires an understanding of two defining features of the nature of public administration. First, public administration is about enabling rather than delivering. ...
The main goal of this article is to define the characteristics of and to evaluate the three selected models used to measure the performance of public administration bodies, with an emphasis placed on their application in different perspectives. The contemporary public administration institutions are obligated to increase their operating efficiency as well as the satisfaction of their stakeholders. This is precisely why they have been implementing diverse models, especially those already used for years in managing profit-oriented organisations. The models chosen for analysis are applied in public administration, making it possible to measure numerous indicators of both financial and nonfinancial nature. The research method adopted by the authors is a conceptual literature review performed using the resources of the Scopus, Springer, WoS, Emerald, and EBSCO databases. The items subject to analysis were the 3Es (i.e., economy, efficiency, effectiveness) and IOO (e.g., input, output, and outcome) models as well as the model included in the BSC (Balance Scorecard). The research has evidenced that each of the models has its strengths and limitations. The results thus obtained have led to a conclusion that the solution showing the highest potential in the area of the study is the performance measurement model proposed under the BSC; however, according to the authors, it still requires some fine-tuning to public administration’s operating conditions and organisational culture. The article also highlights the fundamental operationalisation problems related to the subject in question.
... Morton et al. (2016) conclude that project portfolio selection in the public sector is an intrinsic strategic problem, and must heed social progress. It´s important to notice that without a monetary measurement, the public organizations have a bigger difficult to assess outcomes (Van Dooren et al., 2012) Methods and Tools for Project Selection and Prioritization Arifin et al. (2015) introduce four classes of tools and methods, which are usually employed in project selection and prioritization activities: (1) viability analysis, (2) scoring and ranking techniques, (3) qualitative and quantitative analyses, and (4) graphic analysis methods. Canbaz and Marle (2016) present another division that separates the tools in: (1) mapping tools, usually simple two-axis diagrams, which may be quantitative or qualitative; (2) multi-criteria decision-making tools, including all kinds of scoring and ranking models; (3) mathematical programming, focusing on quantitative, usually financial, criteria; and (4) hybrid tools, which combine tools of the preceding kinds to yield more robust results. ...
Purpose
Project portfolio management (PPM) is a managerial technique used to seek the strategic goals of organizations improving their performance. The public sector has some characteristics that differ from the private sector, since their management approaches are different. The purpose of this paper is to compare the PPM’s practices and techniques in the public and private sectors.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses the study case methodology through eight case studies that were undertaken in Brazil: four in public and four in private sectors. The field research used semi-structured interviews that were analyzed using the NVivo software.
Findings
In both sectors, strategic alignment is the goal of PPM, and the same tools are employed. The public sector displays better process documentation and lower risk awareness than the private sector, showing an improvement point for the public sector. The selection and prioritization criteria differ from each sector, showing the difference in the strategic goals of public and private sectors.
Research limitations/implications
The limitations of this paper are related to the number of organizations studied; however, the case studies represent organizations from different sectors and industries maximizing heterogeneity, but focusing on Brazil.
Social implications
The prioritization and effective allocation of projects spending in the Brazilian public sector could be improved with the comparison of their current practices with the ones used in private sector, increasing its transparency and cost allocation.
Originality/value
This study broadens the understanding of PPM in the public sector, which is a gap in the academic literature, comparing its practices with those used in the private sector.
... As well, destination performance should not be confined only to tourism, but should also focus on public programs that benefit residents and community development more generally. As the general definition of performance as outputs and outcomes of public services does not show what these outputs and outcomes should be [66], this paper defines TDP as the contribution of the economic, industrial, social, and environmental aspects generated by tourism activities and processes within a destination during a certain period of time, including economic growth, improved industrial productivity, environmental protection, and the enhancement of social justice. ...
Performance evaluations are a critical tool in promoting the sustainability of tourist destinations. The literature shows a lack of consensus on basic terminology and definitions of destination performance. While research focuses on business efficiency, areas such as development effectiveness, social equality, and environmental integrity are still not well understood, even though these are salient elements of sustainable development. This paper provides a framework for evaluating destination performance under the 4E rubric of economy, efficiency, effectiveness, and environmental quality, which reflects a more holistic and effective destination performance. The information entropy weight method and a multi-factor comprehensive evaluation model are developed and applied to an international destination, Zhangjiajie, China, which was selected as a case study to test the framework developed. Results show that the economy, efficiency, effectiveness, and environmental quality aspects should be considered when evaluating tourism development performance. The empirical analysis shows that based on these criteria, Zhangjiajie’s destination performance improved measurably during the test period from 2005 to 2009. The results indicate that significant events, natural disasters, and financial crises influence performance most.
... For performance budgeting, this requires diversity and continued refinement of research methods. Importantly, with the changing governance contexts faced by many countries, such as growing deficits and looming unfunded liabilities in many developed economies, the rising importance of multisectorial governance in service delivery, rising partisanship in the legislature, and growing distrust of the public sector, the focus of many performance-budgeting studies seems to be too narrow (Van Dooren, De Caluwe, & Lonti, 2012). It only examines how the tool may impact the appropriation process without thinking about how the changing governance contexts may and should impact the design and implementation of the tool, and how the tool in return may help address the governance challenges faced by policymakers. ...
Since the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) of 1993, the past 20 years represent one of the most remarkable eras for performance budgeting initiatives in the United States. As a result, many studies about this tool have been conducted and published. Based on a systematic review of articles on research related to performance budgeting in major journals in the ten years between 2002 and 2011, this study assesses how performance budgeting research has evolved over time, reviews its accomplishments, and suggests a few directions for future study, such as the need to control for different intervening factors to establish causality, the need for more coherent theoretical frameworks to guide empirical work and structure the relationship between causal factors, and the need for methodological diversity. We also present a few long-standing questions about performance budgeting that future studies may revisit carefully.
This study intends to compare the principles and practices of public administration in the USA, Singapore, and the Philippines to have a better understanding of how these countries differ from each other in their practices and implementation of public administration, in consideration of the cultural, political and institutional factors of each country. The researcher used multivariate factor analysis of data and information sourced from a literature review as the research methodology. America's image is largely attributed to its technology and popular culture, with Silicon Valley receiving favorable reviews. Despite its diverse culture and advanced economies, the US has a strong military and universities. American national identity and patriotism are rooted in shared moral and political values, influenced by European colonization. Singapore has a diverse culture, characterized by acceptance, innovation, and graciousness, but faces challenges like falling exports and terrorism threats. The Philippines, a blend of East and West cultures, is more conservative due to Roman Catholic influence. The study provides awareness of how the three countries differ in their practice of public administration in the USA and Singapore and the Philippines, how their specific public administration best practices facilitate their economic growth and development, and may serve as a model to those countries that can have or obtain the same conditions or serve as a baseline in improving the contributing factors of development. The insights provided by this study served as the baseline for political or institutional practices from the government in formulating plans, projects and related policies.
In this chapter we will look at existing literature on big data and public policymaking and see which assumptions and conclusions are reached on the impact big data has on the public policymaking process. We will follow the lines of reasoning we have made within the previous chapter and therefore we will structure the effects of big data on public policymaking along the lines of technological features, institutional factors and the policy arena itself.
This paper aims to understand how the knowledge field of production engineering interacts with the field of public affairs, which is related to government, public bodies and public policies for many sectors. It is structured under bibliometric analysis and reveals a panorama of 188 papers from 2000 to 2012 that presents where and how these relationships between production engineering and the public affairs occur. This study presents five different analysis to understand these possibilities: papers by year, papers by production engineering areas, papers by author, papers by journal and papers by public functions. Main findings of this research show that the leading areas where these interfaces occur in academic research are environment, sustainability, industry and organizations. Another relevant result is that the intersection of production engineering and the public sector has not been figured year as a core research topic to any individual researcher or to a group of researchers around the world. The main contribution of this paper to the academic community is the pioneering on presenting a view on the size and on the main characteristics of this interface through bibliometric analysis.
This paper discusses a variety of indicators, which can be used to measure aspects of public administration performance. Importantly, we do not aim at providing indicators for measuring the performance of the public administration as a whole. We rather want to suggest indicators for sub-domains within public administration, such as budgeting and human resource management (HRM) policy.
Governments around the world are attempting to ameliorate communications with citizens in order to enhance their trust and confidence in the bodies that govern them. However, better communication between citizens and government can only be achieved by increased government transparency, which is the purpose of various Open Government Information (OGI) initiatives. Unfortunately, these initiatives are not compatible with performance measurement as they are practiced in the contemporary context. Such incompatibility casts doubt on the real ability of OGI to improve the transparency of government. Based on the model of the third-party performance measurement of the implementation of the OGI regulation in China, this study explores how performance management and OGI initiatives could work in tandem. In addition to describing the integration of these two promising agendas, this study further examines the factors that promote variance in the performance of OGI, which is measured by the sum of the self-initiated information disclosure by government and the requested information disclosure by the public. The agencies' institutional capacity determines the performance of OGI. However, organizational arrangement fails to explain the performance of OGI in agencies. Based on the findings, the managerial implications for both the Chinese government and other governments are discussed.
Tackling the key topics of reform and modernization, this important new book systematically examines performance in public management systems. The authors present this seminal subject in an informative and accessible manner, tackling some of the most important themes.
Performance Management in the Public Sector takes as its point of departure a broad definition of performance to redefine major and basic mechanisms in public administration, both theoretically and in practice. The book situates performance in some of the current public management debates; discusses the many definitions of ‘performance’ and how it has become one of the contested agendas of public management; examines measurement, incorporation and use of performance information; and explores the challenges and future directions of performance management.
A must-read for any student or practitioner of public management, this core text will prove invaluable to anyone wanting to improve their understanding of performance management in the public sector.
Exploring boundaries and meanings of public value, the authors seek to identify some of the impediments to progress in the study of public values. The study of public values is often hamstrung by more general problems in the study of values. The authors begin by identifying analytical problems in the study of values and public values. Then they take stock of the public values universe. To identify public value concepts, relevant literature is reviewed and interpreted. Finally, the analytical questions posed in the first section are addressed, focusing specifically on issues related to the hierarchy, causality, and proximity of public values.
'This book is a much welcome tonic for public administration. It is one of the few books that explicitly focus on how audit institutions carry out their performance auditing responsibilities. While auditors will likely read this, the authors have geared the book to a broader readership, including public managers who are often the subject of performance audits.' - From the foreword by Paul Posner, George Mason University, US. © Jeremy Lonsdale, Peter Wilkins and Tom Ling 2011. All rights reserved.
While governance increasingly relies on performance regimes, we have relatively limited empirical knowledge of the full effects of these regimes. This article presents a roughly drawn map of such effects, identifying relevant variables and speculating how they interact with performance measures and are reconstituted by performance regimes.
It is believed that the New Public Management (NPM) doctrine resulted in a disaggregation and a suboptimal fragmentation of government in the 1980s and 1990s, which called for a re-strengthening of the coordination capacity through renewed hierarchy-type mechanisms, market-type mechanisms and network-type mechanisms. In order to assess the validity of this assumption, this article identifies the trajectory of specialization and coordination in four countries (New Zealand, United Kingdom, Sweden, France). The results support the assumption, although different trajectories are discernible. Also, the results point to the renewed emphasis on coordination based on hierarchy, along with markets and networks.
In this essay I argue that many of the technical and analytical developments in public financial management—known broadly as public financial engineering—have weakened rather than strengthened public budgeting. Our central challenge going forward is to understand how these developments will continue to reshape public management.