Effectiveness of municipal administration: the essence and approaches to its evaluation

Since the mid-2000s Russia has paid mush attention to the necessity to improve the quality and efficiency of state and municipal administration, to the evaluation of efficiency of activities of state executive authorities of the subjects of the Russian Federation and local government authorities. The corresponding methods and approaches to monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of defined criteria and indicators were developed at the federal and regional levels. However, most of them have the following disadvantages: they confuse the concepts of efficiency and effectiveness in the management and development of the territory, they do not contain indicators that show the costs of achieving the result, they constantly change the indicators and mathematical tools for aggregating partial indicators into an integrated indicator in the federal methodologies. Therefore, this article summarizes the main domestic and foreign approaches to evaluating the efficiency of municipal management and the activities of authorities; the author, using the example of the Vologda Oblast, analyzes the results of calculating of the integral index of efficiency of activity of local governments, which is calculated in order to allocate grants (inter-budgetary transfers) to the best municipalities according to the assessment results; it is compared with the methodology for assessing the level of socio-economic development, which is applied at the Institute of Socio- Economic Development of Territories of RAS. The article presents the author’s methodology for estimating the management efficiency of socio-economic development in municipal areas on the basis of assessing their potential and the achieved level of development. The article also presents and describes the formation of an integral and unified system for evaluating the efficiency of activity of public authorities in the region and municipalities and their employees.