Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 17th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview V. Working Group on Public Sector Finance and Accounting Author(s) Aleksander Aristovnik University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia Title Performance measurement in the public sector at national and local levels –some applications to Slovenia File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Measuring performance has been increasingly important in public sector recently. However, for many reasons, both political and technical, performance measurements have become an integral part of relatively few governments' management or decision-making systems yet. The threat of privatization and spending cutbacks, made without due consideration for impact of these changes in the future, has certainly helped increase the interest. In addition, several other factors led to the recent focus on performance measurement such as the pervasive dissatisfaction with government employees’ unresponsiveness to the public, the dynamics of Wagner’s Law, which systematically increases the relative size of government, and hence puts pressure on the public finances, and the implementation of New Public Management paradigm. But the introduction of performance indicators into public management has been also carrying both a potential for greater effectiveness and substantial risk. It is thus necessary to unbundle the concept of performance, and review the country- and sector-specific conditions that make for reform success or failure. The key determinant of success or failure is whether the changes were realistic, introduced gradually, and consistent with both the methodological complexity of the topic and the specific country realities (especially administrative capacity and the governance regime). The main purpose of the paper is to review and to discuss different conceptual and methodological issues related to the performance measurement in public sector at national and local levels. In particular, a composition of Public Sector Performance (PSP) and Public Sector Efficiency (PSE) indicators as well as Free Disposal Hull (FDH) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques are presented and then applied to selected emerging economies in Eastern Europe with a special focus on Slovenia and with some suggestions for measuring efficency at local levels (especially municipalities). The paper employs indicators relating to efficiency/effectiveness at the national as well as at the local levels in a number of major policy areas: education, health care and infrastructure. The results show that efficiency and effectiveness in Slovenia differs significantly at national (in comparisons to other selected countries). However, in general, a relatively average performance in most countries is accomplished with too many inputs so that efficiency is quite low. In other words, the selected governments (including the Slovenian government) could use less resources to attain the same outcomes if they were fully efficient. In addition, the paper points out some deficiencies relating to the employed techniques and definitions. Indeed, the applications of presented techniques are hampered by lack of suitable data to apply those techniques and the precise definition of inputs, outputs and outcomes which may significantly influence the empirical results.
