Government Performance Evaluation And Research

Government Performance Evaluation is one of the focuses in public management field. Since 1980s, with the development of new public management and government reconstruction, the performance evaluation of government and public organization draws more and more attention. In China, with the gradual reform in political system and the momentous adjustment in governmental function, the management mode gradually changes from direct into indirect. In this process, government performance evaluation is of great practical significance for overcoming the bottlenecks in government management, for the innovation in management mechanism and for the improvement of government performance. Due to its late start, Chinese government performance evaluation basically is still in the stage of exploration, facing a lot of problems. The paper tries to solve the following issues: study and learn from western countries' advanced experience in government performance evaluation, use scientific theory to evaluate and analyze government performance, construct a government performance evaluation system suited for present China, apply the system in practical problems in order to test the current government's operational efficiency, and point out the possible direction to improve performance. The paper mainly consists of following six parts:1. The part summarizes the definitions of government performance evaluation made by the scholars in and abroad, clearly defines the connotation and extension of government performance evaluation, points out the essence of government performance evaluation is a systematic process of measuring and judging government performance using index system and scientific evaluation methods, surrounding the target of clarifying the level of government performance; The part also describes status quo of government performance evaluation both in and abroad. In the study of foreign countries, we emphasis on the theoretical evolution in the United States, Britain, South Korea, points out that the routes have changed from "efficiency first" to " fair first " since the late 1960s, and stresses that the ultimate goal of the public administration reform is to establish a model of democratic administration, and public administration tends to be customer-oriented; On the demestic, we mainly introduce the type and characteristics of Chinese government performance evaluation. There are two types of government performance evaluation, universal and special. Several prominent characteristics of Chinese government performance evaluation are the faith in the government while debasement in money, the national character of being conservative rather than aggressive, and the relatively centralized political structure, these characteristics are the core factors affecting the generation and operations of Chinese government performance evaluation; we also introduce the relevant practice of domestic and foreign government performance evaluation, focusing on the public service performance management and third-party evaluation of Britain and the United States, and carry out case studies on the government performance evaluation of Fairfax county in east Virginia, the United States and Gansu province, China.2. The part introduces the basic knowledge, theories and principles, and existing problems in establishing government performance evaluation system, determines that the evaluation should be carded out by principals combining internal and external ones, and separates the evaluation process into seven steps: identifying projects-purpose statement and defining results-selecting criteria-establishing performance standards-supervising the outcome-performance reports-using the results; we also compares and analyses usual models used in evaluation, including the results-oriented model, strategic model of performance measurement, Ghobadian & Ashworth's general model, Comprehensive Performance Measurement model, model supporting local government accountability, Center for Accountability and Performance model, feedback system model, and public governance model; we also point out three main problems exist in current government performance evaluation: overly chasing economic indices, laying stress on visible instead of invisible political performance, and laying stress on internal instead of external evaluation, and we advances three principles in establishing government performance evaluation system: scientific, comparable and feasible, and comprehensive.3. The part glances over the outcome of "on Chinese government performance evaluation" carded out by one research group in the minister of personnel, in the report, on the basis of summarizing the designing ideas and technical methods of relevant domestic and foreign index system, with thorough investigation and enough argumentation among relevant exports, the group advances a set of indices made up of 33 objective index suited for Chinese government performance evaluation; Based on the factor analysis methods, we establish an objective data system to evaluate government performance of 14 cities of Liaoning province, determine six factors: the economic factor, the social factor, the objective factor, the education factor, the public services factor, and agriculture factor, use composite score for the ranking of 14 cities, and validate the results by cluster analysis; Based on the data and index of "investigation of the social satisfaction in DaLian municipal department", we analyze the relevant subjective data of government performance evaluation using the AHP-FCE comprehensive evaluation method, and measure the target of social satisfaction in government performance in the view of client, here we also put forward a new convergent algorithm for computing the maximal eigenvalue in Positive Reciprocal matrix. We put forward the amalgamation method of subjective and objective data in two ways, one of which is unification in dealing methods, namely dealing with the subjective data and objective data in the same method, the other of which is to deal with the subjective and objective data in the additive and multiplicative manner with the relative independence of these data.4. In this part, we analyze the six-factor results of 14 cities in LiaoNing Province statistically, and we find that there is a distinct positive relationship between economic factor with the other factors, which indicates that to improve the government performance, the most important factor is to promote economic growth, because the rapid growth in national economy is the primary condition in guaranteeing the advanced residents' living level, enhanced public service, and improved the educational condition. Through graded analysis of the composite index, we find that the government performance of every city of LiaoNing Province apparently shows a polarized trend, and the distribution of economic factor displays a strong disequilibrium, in which the government performances of the two vice-province-city, ShenYang and DaLian, are far higher than those of the other cities. We analyze the government performance of every city lognitudinal and sectional, and the results verify the conclusion that the government performance of every city of LiaoNing Province apparently shows a polarized trend. The comparative analysis based on the time series data shows that the distance between the maximum and minimum of composite score of every city's government performance is gradually decreasing. By analyzing the panel data of the 14 cities during 1998～2004, we come to the conclusion that the graded pattern of government performance in these 14 cities does not change relatively, with that of ShenYang and DaLian being far higher than those of the other cities. In the absolute level, the government performance of these 14cities, including ShenYang and DaLian, does not improve apparently during this period. In the view of analytical results, the local government should fasten the course of system reform, eliminate the unstable factors in economic growth and residual living, and provide a favorable circumstance to improve the government performance. 5. By introducing traditional DEA method and explaining the economic meaning of DEA effective, the part extend DEA with output only and discuss some means to add weighting. With the factor analysis, we construct the DEA with output only under multiple goals, under which we could enlarge the every weight(factor) of output by different ratio(ratio of variance contribution), and then we can consider the relative efficiency under the different degree of importance. Furthermore, we employ this model to analyze whether the 14 cities in LiaoNing Province are in the producing frontier, and searches for possible improving direction. With the test results, we find that ShenYang, DaLian, AnShan, JinZhou, PanJin, TieLing are always iDEA effective, and the others all appeared DEA ineffective. Furthermore, we could analyze the composite index of factor when DEA ineffective, and give the direction to improve it's government performance.6. In this part, we employ the assignment problem in operational research to optimize the government performance, and put forward a new algorithm——the least adjustment method. Dealing with the assignment problem with this method shows the method has some superior characteristics, including flexibility, convenience, simplicity and easiness in running. Combined with actual problems, we put forward and construct the "allowing-one-work-done-by-two-people" model, point out that this model generally belongs to NP-hard problem, give the solution to this question, verify its effective by case. When we use the same idea to deal with the "least time limit" problems, we also have satisfactory outcome.This paper follows the technical route of consulting foreign advanced experience-analyzing status quo in China-designing the separate index systems of subjective and object indices-statistical analysis of indices-analyzing and improving through DEA-relevant assignment problem. Using the mathematic models of factor analysis, analytical hierarchy process, fuzzy evaluation, DEA, aiming at the government performance evaluation index, this paper researches and analyzes government performance evaluation quantitatively. With theoretical research in mathematic methods and empirical research in government performance, combining theory with practice, using qualitative analysis and quantitative research, this paper explores the government performance evaluation actively.