Towards a General Managerial Framework for Performance Measurement: A Comprehensive Highway Maintenance Application

This paper describes the application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to a highway maintenance setting, using measures of inputs, outputs and outcomes reported by New Zealand local authorities. A general framework of performance measurement is developed and illustrated through application to the highway setting. The framework encompasses a performance pyramid embodying multiple-perspectives of the organisation with a structure of measures linking critical success factors to process drivers, methods of data analysis and influencing factors such as professional culture. Distinctions between measures of outcome, output and input enable finer partitioning of analyses into managerial notions of efficiency, effectiveness and economy. The impact of environmental factors on efficiency is explored through two approaches suggested in the literature.     

Local government amalgamation policy: A highway maintenance evaluation

Evaluating the effects of a change in public policy setting is a critical element in the chain of accountability. Factors such as effectiveness and efficiency in government operations are often difficult to measure. In this study of efficiency outcomes, we follow events before and after significant structural change arising from local authority amalgamation. The study focuses on highway maintenance and uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to evaluate whether greater efficiency was achieved. Results (confined to highway management activities) show no evidence that amalgamation was justified in terms of diseconomies arising from smallness (i.e. increasing returns to scale). While new governance practices introduced contemporaneously lifted the level of performance of local authorities in terms of higher technical efficiency, there is no evidence that the amalgamation policy contributed to this improvement. The policy impact evaluation methodology developed in this paper has potential for application to other local government service activities.