Evaluation of management efficiency in the public sector: limitations and insuperable difficulties

Nowadays effective management of an organization is the most important key to its success and even survival; foremost it concerns commercial entities but also becomes vital for state administration system and institutions of social sphere. Traditionally the public sector was considered the sphere of “rainbows and butterflies” where organizations focused on the process of providing services without any special reliance on efficiency and higher performance. This situation began to change in the mid-1980s when principles of New Public Management started to gain popularity; as opposed to the approaches of the traditional concept of Public Administration, these principles sensitize the institutions to efficiency, achieving results, and in general using in the public sector management business tools for employee motivation, planning and activity control. In social sphere and in the public sector in general issues of evaluation of management efficiency are gaining more significance. First of all the understanding of executive authorities’ role is changing; society expects efficiency and transparency, as well as commitment to a certain significant result. At the same time the evaluation of state administration efficiency is impeded by objective causes. So, state services providing is often the activity with large volumes that is difficult to control. Regardless of this limitation state authorities tend to develop and introduce formal methods of the evaluation of state administration efficiency. But in reality these rigidly regimented schemes have many hidden problems of methodological and methodic nature, and thus the evaluation results achieved with their help at best speak little about the efficiency itself or at worst make it possible to wangle the data and customize “for the answer”. The author analyses limits to applicability of the formal methods of executive authorities’ efficiency evaluation taking as a basis theoretical and methodological model of Woolcock-Pritchett-Izrael-Fukuyama and using examples from the Russian and foreign experience of state administration.