Performance information is crucial for high-performance government. Performance budgeting is part of that: budget decision-making needs to be informed by good information about the effectiveness and efficiency of government spending. The approach to performance information must, however, be highly strategic. To succeed, it needs to be built on a recognition of two fundamental realities. Firstly, […]
Evaluation should be a key source of information for budget decision-makers. In practice, however, it has had surprisingly little impact on decisions about what to fund and by how much. This raises the question: what can be done to realize the true potential of evaluation to improve budgeting? The failure of evaluation to contribute much […]
Is efficiency analysis the poor relation in the current wave of evaluation reforms? Governments around the world have been establishing government-wide evaluation policies; creating central units and task forces to promote evaluation; and encouraging or requiring ministries to build evaluation capability and carry out more and better evaluations. In these reforms, it is always said […]
A wave of enthusiasm for evaluation has been sweeping governments around the world in recent years. In country after country, governments are acting to increase the amount of evaluation undertaken and ensure that it is used more. Government-wide evaluation policies have been developed, and specialized units and task forces established to promote, guide, and regulate […]
France’s budgetary position is disastrous, and the country appears to be moving inexorably towards a fiscal crisis like that which brought Greece to its knees over a decade ago. The land of Molière presents one of the extreme cases of failure to implement fiscal consolidation after the large-scale fiscal stimulus during the COVID-19 pandemic. But […]
Contemporary public financial management (PFM) is, according to an emerging school of thought, in a parlous condition and needs a complete rebuild. I disagree. An influential recent formulation of the views of this school of thought can be found in the 2020 report Advice, Money, Results (AMR). This report issues a challenge to contemporary PFM […]
To what extent can digitalization give us what we need to properly measure government performance? What follows is the last in a series addressing this question, as well as a closely associated question: should we shift our focus from the monitoring and evaluation of performance to government analytics? Although digitalization is a valuable tool for […]
What opportunities does digitalization offer for better measures of output quality in the public sector? This question is the focus of what follows – the second in a series examining the extent to which digitalization can improve performance measurement in government. Let’s first recap the discussion so far. Digitalization means the use of digital tools […]
Digitalization improves public sector performance. But to what extent does it also enhance performance measurement? To what extent can digitalization give us what we need to properly measure government performance? These are questions that I will try to answer in this and two subsequent blog pieces. But before doing so, let’s be clear about what […]
Yet another call for governments to abandon debt limits and focus instead on net worth! This time it’s in the United Kingdom, where an influential think tank, the Resolution Foundation, has proposed the replacement of the country’s debt rules with “a target to see net worth improving.” This is a bad idea that must be […]