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 […]
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 […]
The idea that governments should base their budgets on output unit costs is very influential. Everywhere in the world one finds people who think that unit costs are the key to making performance budgeting work. Nowhere is this more true today than in the developing world.* I know of several developing countries where the budget […]
In this blog piece – the third in a series of four – I look at why budgeting based on unit costs doesn’t work well for services where there is a lot of uncertainty about the quantity of output which government will need to deliver. This is one of the key reasons why unit cost […]
In this blog piece — the second of a four-part series on unit cost budgeting — I look at why unit cost budgeting cannot be applied to outputs which are highly “heterogeneous,” of which there are many in government. This is one of the main reasons why unit cost budgeting should be viewed as a […]
Funding public services based on output unit costs is a great idea. However, it only works for selected government services. The idea that the entire government budget should be based on output unit costs is therefore misguided. This series of four blog pieces looks at why this is a tool with strictly limited application in […]