Government Performance

This slim volume, a seminal study, provides a positive picture of public managers eager to learn and to create management capacity, which is posited as the key to governmental performance... A must read for students of public management.

The authors of this volume argue that one quality above all is crucial to the overall performance of government: effective management.

Taking the ambitious and unique approach of using empirical analysis to identify the key linkages between public management and effective policy performance, this book offers students a larger and more reliable set of empirical guideposts and prescriptions than have ever before been available. This is a bold project that goes beyond any earlier effort to define and measure the qualities of government that yield effective public policy, and there is much for all of us to learn here.

The book's theme is an important and timely one: that management matters and that management reform would be most fruitfully approached as a long-term building of competencies and components necessary to effect change. The qualitative and quantitative data have been used to craft one of the more comprehensive and integrated pictures of management available in the field. In undertaking such a project, and succeeding as they have, the authors have done an enormous service to the field.

An ambitious and well-publicized attempt to define criteria for measuring government performance... Well argued and rich in material.