How to Promote the Service Quality of the Public Sector by Award Mechanism?

The quality of service in the public sector has been a popular issue over the past two decades. All over the world, many governments and international organizations have set up some awards to evaluate the service performance of the public sector and encourage public organizations to devote themselves to improving their service quality. In Australia, the annual National Awards were established in 1986 and are run by the Department of Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government. This paper takes the National Awards for Local Government as an example to analyze important characteristics of this award, such as award themes, selection criteria, evaluation process, etc. At the end of this paper, some important findings will be discussed and some directions will be proposed for further studies on this topic.