A Research On The Government Performance Measurement Mode Of Chinese Town In View Of The Public Value

Why we must measure the government performance? The answer is that measuring performance will engender some benefits. But how do we know it is good? The former question can derive the answer from the activities of private sector. Because business firms all measure their performance, and everyone knows that the private sector is managed better than the public sector. Unfortunately, the kinds of financial ratios the business world uses to measure a firm's performance are not appropriate for the public sector. What kind of performance should they measure, how should they measure it, and what should they do with these measurements? So what should public agencies measure? Performance, of course. But performance measurement is not an end in itself. So why should public managers measure performance? Because they may find such measures helpful in achieving specific managerial purposes. Public managers can use such information to perform ten different tasks: to respond to elected officials' and the public's demands for accountability; make budget requests; do internal budgeting; trigger in-depth examinations of performance problems and possible corrections; motivate; contract; evaluate; support strategic planning; communicate better with the public to build public trust; and improve. As part of their overall management strategy, public managers can use performance measures to evaluate, control, budget, motivate, promote, celebrate, learn, and improve. Improving programs is the fundamental purpose of performance measurement, and two uses—improving accountability and increasing communications with the public—are intended to make program improvements that lead to improved outcomes. For the measurement of performance, the public manager's real purpose—indeed, the only real purpose—is to improve performance. The other seven purposes are simply means for achieving this ultimate purpose. Unfortunately, no single performance measure is appropriate for all eight purposes. Consequently, public managers should not seek the one magic performance measure. The leaders of public agencies can use performance measures to achieve a number of very different purposes, and they need to think seriously about the managerial purposes to which performance measurement might contribute and how they might deploy these measures. Moreover, different people have different purposes. Stakeholders have different purposes than public managers. Consequently, thedissertation focused on publics rather than on public agencies.On the other hand, principal-agent relationships are a common older mode of community interaction, and it always happens between two or more parties. The two parties are the agent who will make decisions for the other's best interests and the principal who will pay to agent. The theory of principal is a new economics, which deals with principal-agent relationships. The society has a large scale and its members spread around. The individual of public is a principal but his capability isn't strong enough to control the agent. So the monitoring costs don't match the benefits. Even the supervisions of public cannot improve the actions of agent. These entire phenomena cause the free rider problem. So in the public sector there are much agent problems. At the same time, it is so difficult to measure the performance of government. Consequently, using the theory of principal is very important in the public sector. Fortunately, the government functions are stable and the operation of agency is in process. If you can design an appropriate institution, the government may have an effective institution to solve the problem of information asymmetry. The mode of government performance measurement is a feasible institution of those kinds to solve the agent problems, because we must use the performance criteria to evaluate the government management levels.Although the performance measurement has so many benefits, the most local governments cannot use information enough. The government performance measurement is still focus on inputs or outputs rather on service quality and outcomes. So the government always becomes wasteful, ineffective and unresponsive. Government performance measurement is actually a management controlling action, and its process includes two processes that is quality control plus quality improvement. Quality control is a general process for the operation and it can produce stability that means protect the negative change and stay in status quo. hi order to keep stability, quality control will measure the actual performance and contrast it with previous objective, and then it need take action to eliminate the gap between them. In evidence, the performance level will not improve if there has only the quality control process. We must put up quality improvement action to improve the performance level, because the quality improvement process can bring the huge change and aid to reach an unpredictable performance level. A systematic mode of government performance measurement is an indispensable step of public management, because it is an action that caused by the public demand. That is to say, all the governments must measurethose performances. This dissertation study the government performance measurement mode of Chinese town and this orientation just meets the actual needs.Sum up, the dissertation aims on the purpose of researching on the government performance measurement mode of Chinese towns with the principal theory in order to construct a new government performance measurement mode for Chinese towns that is based on the public interests.The dissertation has three innovations: 1. Regard the public as principal, so the government is the agent. On this condition, the author scanned the government management functions and the performance measurement mode of Chinese town again. 2. The author gave a new concept i.e. "public value" which derived from the theory of "customer value". Public value is a new criterion that the public can use to evaluate the government service levels. It includes a trade-off of give and get after the public received public service. The scale of "public value" tries to evaluate government in view of public interests indeed, and it also conquers the defects that brought by the old performance measurement mode. 3. The author dived public service quality into two factors such as common quality and special quality, and construct a new evaluation criteria set for public service by combing the function measures and SERVQUAL scales. Further, the dissertation advocate governments use the DEA means to measure their productivity and find their benchmarks for the first time.