The current economic and political climate places ever greater pressure on public organizations to deliver services in a cost-efficient way. Focused on the costs of service delivery, governments across the world have introduced a series of business like practices – from performance management to public-private partnership – in the belief that these will increase the efficiency of their public services. However, both the debate about public service efficiency and the policies and practices introduced to advance it, have developed without a coherent account of what efficiency means in this context and how it should be realized. The predominance of a rather narrow definition of the term – very often focused on the ratio of inputs to outputs – has tended to polarise opinion either for or against efficiency agenda. Yet public service efficiency, more broadly conceived, is an inescapable fact of the public manager’s task environment; indeed in the past, the notion of efficiency was central to the emergence of the field of public administration. This book will recover public service efficiency from the relatively narrow terms of recent debates by examining theories and evidence relating to technical, allocative, distributive and dynamic efficiencies. In exploring the relationship between efficiency and democracy, this book will move current debates in public administration forward by reflecting on the trade-offs between the different dimensions of efficiency that public organizations confront.

The performance of governments around the globe is constantly in the spotlight, whether as a celebration or indictment of their activities. Providing evidence on strategies to improve the performance of public agencies is therefore essential to the practice of public management. Originally published in 2006, this important contribution to the debate explores issues of measurement, research methodology, and management influences on performance. It focuses on three key questions: what approaches should be adopted to measure the performance of public agencies? What aspects of management influence the performance of public agencies? As the world globalizes, what are the key international issues in performance measurement and management? In examining these questions, the contributors debate both methodological and technical issues regarding the measurement of performance in public organizations, and provide empirical analyses of the determinants of performance. The book concludes with groundbreaking work on the international dimensions of these issues.

This volume describes how frontier efficiency methodologies such as Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and other techniques such as multi-criteria decision making can help service industries to improve their performance by providing a ranking of best-practice efficient service units and by identifying sources of inefficiency for each service unit. It explains how they can be used to determine potential improvement targets for each of the inefficient service units, to identify peers for each service organization and to provide a basis for continuous performance improvement. Presenting applications in a variety of industries, this book will be useful for the service management to improve service productivity, profitability, sustainability and quality and effectiveness of service deliveries. A free trial version of the World’s leading Data Envelopment Analysis Software (PIM-DEA) is available for readers of this book.

3 While all of these explanations seem to have merit, there is one dominant reason why the percentage of GDP and employment dedicated to services has continued to increase: low productivity. According to Baumol's cost disease hypothesis (Baumol, Blackman, and Wolff 1991), the growth in services is actually an illusion. The fact is that service-sector productivity is improving slower than that of manufacturing and thus, it seems as if we are consuming more services in nominal terms. However, in real terms, we are consuming slightly less services. That is, the increase in the service sector is caused by low productivity relative to manufacturing. The implication of Baumol's cost disease is the following. Assuming historical productivity increases for manufacturing, agriCUlture, education and health care, Baumol (1992) shows that the U. S. can triple its output in all sectors within 50 years. However, due to the higher productivity level for manufacturing and agriculture, it will take substantially more employment in services to achieve this increase in output. To put this argument in perspective, simply roll back the clock 100 years or so and replace the words manufacturing with agriculture, and services with manufacturing. The phenomenal growth in agricultural productivity versus manufacturing caused the employment levels in agriculture in the U. S. to decrease rapidly while producing a truly unbelievable amount of food. It is the low productivity of services that is the real culprit in its growth of GDP and employment share.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Environmental Governance held in Makassar, Indonesia. The 67 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 212 submissions. The papers reflect the conference sessions as follows: ICT and Environmental Sustainability, Electronic Environmental Monitoring, E-Government for Environmental System, Environmental law and politics, Sustainable future for human security, Disaster risk reduction, Climate change and adaptive capacity, Islamic environmental thought, Socio-environmental conflicts, Global environmental change, Sustainable development goals (SDGs), Ocean policy and governance, Rural development and planning, Forest governance and conservation, Water and soil conservation, Business and CSR, and Urban vulnerability and resilience.

Over the last two decades, the field of public administration has witnessed theoretical and practical changes that have innovated the relationships between public administration and performance management. Dealing with the rising complexity of performance regimes in contemporary public administration requires that policy-makers and their organizations are able to face unpredictable problems impacting on a community’s quality of life. Complex policy issues – such as immigration, pandemics, societal aging, crime, unemployment, and financial crises – cannot be easily solved by quick fixes that are focused only on a short-term and bounded vision of their causes. They rather require “robust” methods to support policy analysis and to affect sustainable community outcomes in cross-boundary settings. As illustrated in this book, Dynamic Performance Management provides a methodological framework enabling policy-makers to outline the causal relationships among policy outcomes, performance drivers, and related strategic resources. Such a modeling approach helps stakeholders to broaden the investigated system boundaries so to balance short- and long-term performance under different result domains. This approach blends performance management and System Dynamics modeling. Several examples and case studies are discussed to enable scholars and practitioners to appreciate the practical implications related to the use of such an approach.

"This Report aims to inspire and guide the researchers and practitioners who can help advance a new set of development approaches based on a fuller consideration of psychological and social influences." - p. 2