Current State and Future Agenda for Performance Measurement in the Local Government:

Lessons Learned from 20 years Practices in the 47 Prefectures

Abstract

  Prefectures have played a leading role in the introduction of evaluation systems into local governments in Japan. At present, almost all local governments have a variety of evaluation systems, most of which adopt performance measurement to implement Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle in the management. However, there seems to be a number of problems in their way of handling data in the process of setting performance measures and their targets, and benchmarking. This article shows the results from the survey of performance measurement systems in all the prefectures of Japan, which follows the previous survey in 2008. This article classifies the typical problems of performance measurement and also explores the way of acquiring the quality of measurement and benchmarking.