Does Performance Monitoring Work? A Review of the Evidence from the UK Public Sector, Excluding Health Care

This paper reviews the use of performance monitoring in the UK public sector, excluding its use in health care. Our focus is on finding robust evidence that evaluates the success of the introduction of performance monitoring in terms of its impact both on behaviour and on final outcomes. We begin with a general discussion of performance monitoring (hereafter PM), before considering the nature of the public sector and the implications of this for the implementation of such schemes within it. We then review the evidence and find a general lack of quantitative evidence on the impact of PM schemes on outcomes. This is partly due to the problem of attributing changes in outcome to the introduction of a specific PM scheme. One of our recommendations, therefore, is to consider piloting of PM schemes more widely in order to provide such evidence prior to national implementation. JEL Classification: D23, J33, J45