Performance Reporting by New Zealand Central Government Agencies

<p>This study attempts to assess longitudinally the increase in the quality of performance information resulting from the Managing for Outcome (MfO) initiative, embarked on by the New Zealand Government in December 2001, and to identify the internal and external factors influencing the increase in quality. To measure the quality of performance information, a disclosure index was developed. The index assesses the comprehensiveness of information in compliance with available guidance, and reflects the approaches used by Marston and Shrives (1991), and Guthrie et. al. (2004). The disclosure analysis was applied to publicly available planning documents - the Statement of Intent and Annual Report of 27 New Zealand Government departments over the period 2003-2007. Agency theory, focusing on the role of information in the accountability relationship between principals and their agents, and public choice theory, focusing on the mechanisms to mitigate public choice problems, are used to explain the improvement in the quality of performance information and the external and internal factors influencing the improvement in quality. The roles performed and the activities initiated and implemented by ministers and other government agencies in the MfO initiative are identified and analysed. The data for the study was obtained from the reports of selected New Zealand central government departments and from semi-structured interviews. The findings support the Auditor General's assertion of disappointing quality in performance information. Weak incentives for reporting outcomes, the lack of authoritative reporting standards, and constraints on measuring performance have been the key factors in explaining the lack of meaningful progress in New Zealand performance reporting practice implemented under the MfO initiative. The initiatives do not include proper accountability arrangements, where the ministers responsible for outcomes also report; instead the current arrangement is that chief executives report but are not themselves accountable.</p>

Performance Reporting by New Zealand Central Government Agencies

<p>This study attempts to assess longitudinally the increase in the quality of performance information resulting from the Managing for Outcome (MfO) initiative, embarked on by the New Zealand Government in December 2001, and to identify the internal and external factors influencing the increase in quality. To measure the quality of performance information, a disclosure index was developed. The index assesses the comprehensiveness of information in compliance with available guidance, and reflects the approaches used by Marston and Shrives (1991), and Guthrie et. al. (2004). The disclosure analysis was applied to publicly available planning documents - the Statement of Intent and Annual Report of 27 New Zealand Government departments over the period 2003-2007. Agency theory, focusing on the role of information in the accountability relationship between principals and their agents, and public choice theory, focusing on the mechanisms to mitigate public choice problems, are used to explain the improvement in the quality of performance information and the external and internal factors influencing the improvement in quality. The roles performed and the activities initiated and implemented by ministers and other government agencies in the MfO initiative are identified and analysed. The data for the study was obtained from the reports of selected New Zealand central government departments and from semi-structured interviews. The findings support the Auditor General's assertion of disappointing quality in performance information. Weak incentives for reporting outcomes, the lack of authoritative reporting standards, and constraints on measuring performance have been the key factors in explaining the lack of meaningful progress in New Zealand performance reporting practice implemented under the MfO initiative. The initiatives do not include proper accountability arrangements, where the ministers responsible for outcomes also report; instead the current arrangement is that chief executives report but are not themselves accountable.</p>

Economic Peace Revisited: Coercion and Democracy

Scholars have argued whether democratic peace also holds in the realm of economic sanctions — whether there is an economic peace. Substantial amounts of evidence have been gathered both for and against economic peace and findings have been extremely sensitive to changes in research design. This article provides a new insight, with the use of the updated TIES data set and improved methodology, into the topic of economic peace. It find that democracies are more likely to issue economic sanctions and that there is no economic peace. In fact, democracies are more likely to sanction one another. The article indicate that lack of economic peace is consistent with the public choice approach to economic sanctions. It also argue that the exercise of power among democracies has been rechannelled to economic coercion.

Health system efficiency and democracy: A public choice perspective

Due to increasing demand and scarce financial resources for healthcare, health system efficiency has become a major topic in political and scientific debates. While previous studies investigating determinants of health system efficiency focused primarily on economic and social influence factors, the role of the political regime has been neglected. In addition, there is a lack of formal theoretical work on this specific topic, which ensures transparency and logical consistency of arguments and implications. Using a public choice approach, this paper provides a rigorous theoretical and empirical investigation of the relationships between health system efficiency and political institutions. We develop a simple principal-agent model describing the behavior of a government with respect to investments in population health under different political regimes. The main implication of the theoretical model is that governments under more democratic regimes put more effort in reducing embezzlement of health expenditure than non-democratic regimes. Accordingly, democratic countries are predicted to have more efficient health systems than non-democratic countries. We test this hypothesis based on a broad dataset including 158 countries over the period 1995-2015. The empirical results clearly support the implications of the theoretical model and withstand several robustness checks, including the use of alternative indicators for population health and democracy and estimations accounting for endogeneity. The empirical results also indicate that the effect of democracy on health system efficiency is more pronounced in countries with higher income levels. From a policy perspective, we discuss the implications of our findings in the context of health development assistance.

The New Authoritarianism in Public Choice

Much early public choice theory focused on alleged pathologies of democratic legislatures, portraying them as irrational, manipulable, or subject to capture. Recent years have seen the emergence of a new strand of argument, reaffirming the old skepticism of legislatures but suggesting that transferring power from legislatures to chief executives offers a solution. Just as the earlier prescriptions ignored the pathologies of the agencies empowered to check and constrain legislatures, so the new scholarship overlooks the pathologies of executive power. The primary sources of congressional dysfunction call for reforms that would strengthen Congress instead of hobbling it in new ways that exacerbate the drift toward authoritarian presidentialism in the American system. Executive aggrandizement is a consequence of decades of institutional malfunction, worsened by right-wing attacks on legislative capacity. This has been the enduring impact of the public choice movement since the 1950s, but its twenty-first century offshoot is especially malign.