Germany: Dorothea Greiling
Doctor Dorothea Greiling of the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, is author of "performance measurement in the public sector: the German experience".
Although some public sector organisations do have ‘target agreements’ for personnel, as well as at an organisational level, Germany does not have a target-driven culture. And often these agreements are implemented in a formal, not a substantive, way. Germany is not a frontrunner in New Public Management. The German public sector lags behind the experiences in Scandinavia, where targets are more widely used.
The question as to whether targets are working cannot be answered in a general way. Experience is not consistent and performance targets are not widely adopted. The more difficult it is to set ‘objective’ performance indicators, the more difficult it is to apply them. That said, there has definitely been an increased use of targets in the public sector over the last few years. In terms of the future, I predict many more experiments with performance contracts. PPP contracts will in future typically use performance indicators to trigger payments. There are some weak signals that complementary elements will need to be added – for example, regarding trust. There is growing awareness that functioning performance management systems must be embedded in relationships based on trust.
Canada: Nadeem Esmail
Nadeem Edmail is Director of Health System Performance Studies at The Fraser Institute, in Alberta, Canada
Targets are relatively new here and Canada does not have a target-driven culture. Some targets seem to do their job. For example, in the healthcare sector, long waiting times have been reduced to some extent.
The question is whether they have an unintended effect on everything not targeted. Health targets are specific – other things get pushed to the wayside. Hospitals in Ontario get extra money to do specific things – but where is the operating time coming from? Is it coming from downtime over weekends, or is it at the expense of other procedures? The evidence from specialists not working in target areas and from wait times in non-target areas is that there does appear to be some capture of resources. Targets have been used more in recent times, taking a lead from the UK and Sweden. I think we will see an increase in the use of targets in coming years. Waiting time guarantees were introduced earlier this year, for example.
Japan: Colin Talbot
Colin Talbot, Professor of Public Policy and Management at Manchester Business School, has at the request of the Japanese government , looked at Japan's use of performance measurement.
Japan does not have a target-driven culture in the same way as the UK. Japan’s Government Policy Evaluation Act required government departments to evaluate activities. Some ‘evaluation’ would be called performance measurement in the UK. It’s of a huge industrial scale – 10,000 reports a year. These evaluations seem to be working, in some respects. Many evaluations are of public works programmes. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi used reviews for his reform programme to provide evidence of which schemes to close – and they did.
There has been a massive increase in the use of performance reporting. For example, 50,000 reports have been tabled in Parliament so far. To date, evaluations were driven by the former Koizumi government. They are within the government system – very different from the UK, where information is publicly accessible and has a big impact, for example, school league tables on house prices. In Japan the government could get rid of them without resistance.
