Abstract
The Municipal Evaluation Consortium was formed seven years ago to break the impasse that municipalities in Japan had been facing in their evaluation practice. Since the Consortium was established its membership has grown from fifteen cities to eighty. Activities of the Consortium now include the calculation of deviation values for twenty public service areas and the provision of analysis results, called karte, for each participating municipality.
In the analytic approach adopted by the Consortium, the following four types of performance measures are used; basic measures that represent the circumstances involving public services, results measures that reflect the results of public services and activities, outcome measures that show the degree to which citizens respond to or utilize public services and activities, and cost measures. The effectiveness of employing such measures is recognized by many public officials and employees involved in the Consortium.
In this article, the families of measures developed by the Consortium are presented for the following public service areas; adult health examination service, long-term care insurance projects, library service, community center administration and operation, fire and emergency service, garbage collection and disposal, and gender equality programs.
The analysis results, karte, that have been developed and refined by trial and error by the Consortium are explained. The cases where karte are effectively utilized are also presented. Finally, suggested improvements in public services and activities using benchmarking and further problems are discussed.
