Incentive Schemes for Local Government

In recent years, explicit incentive schemes for public organisations, based on quantitative measurement of outputs, have become increasingly commonly used in the UK. For example, school league tables, hospital star ratings, and various schemes for local government, such as Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA), have been introduced in the last twenty years or so. Moreover, with few exceptions, schemes of this type have been little used outside the UK.1 Finally, the schemes just noted have only been introduced in England, creating the possibility of using other regions of the UK as control groups to study their effects.