Administrative performance appraisal is the process of using different indicators to measure government performance, therefore, establishing the indicator system of appraisal is the foundation and core of appraisal activities. The so-called indicator system of administrative performance evaluation refers to the sum of a series of data and standards set by the administrative organization according to certain value criteria as a measure of administrative performance. As already mentioned, administrative performance assessment is characterized by multi-objectivity and flexibility. Administrative organizations, as exercisers of public **** power, must serve public **** interests. However, the public **** interests at the social level are wide-ranging and varied, and the values pursued by the government vary, which sets a variety of goals and values for the behavior of administrative organs, and also puts forward the requirement of systematization of the indicator system for the assessment of administrative performance. Monotonizing and simplifying the indicators of administrative performance will obliterate the diversity of values of administrative organizations, and will have a serious negative impact on the development of administrative organizations themselves and on the development of society. At the Third Plenary Session of the Sixteenth Central Committee of the Chinese ****productive Party, the Central Committee of China ****proposed adherence to a people-oriented, comprehensive, coordinated, and sustainable scientific concept of development, and emphasized the need to educate cadres to establish a correct concept of political performance. The report on the work of the Government at the second session of the Tenth National People's Congress also emphasized that the establishment of a correct concept of political performance is an important element in strengthening the building of a political culture. The scientific concept of development and the correct concept of performance is to overcome the reality of the existence of a single economic indicators and figures for the assessment of political performance of the wrong tendency to guide the performance evaluation and assessment gradually towards a comprehensive, scientific and holistic.
Based on different criteria, the indicator system of administrative performance evaluation can be categorized in different ways.
(I) Divided according to the nature of the content of administrative performance
1. Economic Development Indicators
Economic performance is manifested in the sustained development of the economy, where the national economy not only expands quantitatively but also qualitatively improves under the premise of rational structure. Generally speaking, the administrative economic performance of a country mainly refers to the level of macroeconomic development, and the main indicators are:
1) the level of per capita national income; 2) the growth rate of per capita national income; 3) the rate of social employment; 4) the total amount of imports and exports; and so on. Of course, there are economists put forward different views. Two economists from the University of Maryland, Prof. Murrell and Prof. Olson, point out that in order to more accurately measure the real performance of a country's economy, the gap between its actual per capita national income growth rate and its potential per capita national income growth rate needs to be taken into account. In other words, good economic performance means that a country is able to maximize its potential capacity for economic growth and reduce the gap between its actual and potential per capita national income growth rates.
2. Social Development Indicators
Social performance is the comprehensive progress of society based on economic development. Comprehensive social progress has rich connotations, including: general improvement and enhancement of people's living standards and quality of life; timely supply of social public **** products, good social security conditions, people live and work in peace and contentment; social harmony and order, coordination between social groups and ethnic groups, without obvious confrontation and sharp conflict; and so on. Specifically, there can be some indicators as follows:
(1) Indicators of social and educational development. This includes a series of indicators such as the school attendance rate of school-age children, the graduation rate of junior high school, high school and university per unit of population, the proportion of the state's annual financial resources invested in education, and the indicators of students' physical quality.
(2) Indicators of social health development. Including the number of medical institutions per unit of population, the number of medical facilities per unit of population, annual per capita medical and health expenditures, the value of the difference in health expenditures between different regions, the actual effect of the state's medical investment and other indicators.
(3) Environmental protection indicators. Including indicators such as national forest area, forest area per capita, arable land per capita, amount of water resources per capita, greening area per capita.
(4) Social security and accident indicators. Including the annual incidence of public security incidents, the incidence rate and detection rate of all types of cases, the frequency of all types of transportation and safety accidents, the number of deaths in accidents and other indicators.
3. Political Development Indicators
Under the conditions of a market economy, political performance is most often expressed in terms of institutional arrangements and institutional innovation. The rules of the game in a market economy are a governmental institutional arrangement, which is one of the core competencies of the government. The stronger the government's ability to make institutional arrangements, the easier it is for political performance to manifest itself. The content of political development is broad and abstract, and the indicators are not easy to determine, but they mainly include:
(1) Indicators of the management of administrative institutions. Including the number of civil servants in the administrative organization, the ratio to the total population, the ratio of the administrative body's own expenditures to all financial expenditures, and so on.
(2) Administrative decision-making indicators. Including indicators of the degree of democratization of administrative decision-making of a political nature, indicators of the degree of participation of the public and social experts in decision-making, indicators of the timeliness of decision-making procedures, and so on.
The three types of indicators, namely economic development, social development and political development, are macro-level administrative performance assessment indicators that are organically combined. Economic development plays a fundamental role in the whole administrative performance system, without which the latter two will lose their material basis. Social development is the value objective of the administrative performance system; without comprehensive social development, economic development will lose its significance. Political development is the pivot and core of the entire administrative performance system, providing institutional and legal guarantees for the realization of economic and social development. Only when these three indicators are applied organically and comprehensively to administrative performance assessment can the objective and fair assessment of administrative performance be achieved.
(2) According to the method of assessment of the division of line
According to the method of assessment of the division of administrative performance assessment, there are a number of categories of indicators, domestic and foreign scholars have different views on this. Scholar Fenwick believes that administrative performance assessment includes three dimensions: economy (economy), efficiency (efficiency) and effectiveness (effectiveness), that is, the famous 3E indicators. Scholar Frain added on the basis of this fairness (equity) indicators, become 4E, recognized by management practitioners around the world, the following specifications.
1. Economic assessment indicators
Economic assessment indicators, that is, cost assessment indicators, generally refers to the level of resources that the organization puts into the management project. Cost metrics are concerned with "inputs" and how to make the most economic use of those inputs. In other words, cost indicators require that a given quantity and quality of public **** product or service be provided and maintained at the lowest possible input or cost. The cost indicator seems to be asking, "How much money is an organization spending in a given period of time? Is it spending money in accordance with statutory procedures?" Economic indicators are not concerned with the quality of the service.
Money is the blood of administrative activities. However, what an administrative organization actually invests when it engages in managerial activities is not money, but manpower, material resources, equipment, etc., which are converted from money. Even in some activities involving direct payment of money (e.g., the distribution of relief funds), manpower, material resources and fixed assets are needed to process case applications. These manpower, material resources, equipment, etc. constitute the inputs of the administrative organization to a particular management activity, and the money spent on acquiring and maintaining them is the cost of the inputs. Uneconomies can be manifested both in the form of funds spent above the market rate to obtain a particular input (e.g., purchase of a piece of equipment) and in the form of over-investment, such as overly luxurious office conditions, idle equipment, etc.
2. Efficiency assessment indicators
Efficiency indicators to determine the "administrative organs in a given period of time, the budgetary inputs to produce what kind of results". Administrative efficiency is usually defined as the ratio of administrative inputs to administrative outputs. Generally speaking, administrative efficiency is inversely proportional to administrative inputs; in the case of certain administrative outputs, the higher the administrative inputs, the lower the administrative efficiency; conversely, the higher the administrative efficiency. On the other hand, administrative output and administrative efficiency have a positive relationship, in the case of a certain administrative input, the higher the administrative output, the higher the administrative efficiency. Efficiency assessment mainly measures the relationship between outputs and inputs. This relationship can be demonstrated by a range of efficiency indicators. Typically, efficiency indicators include: the level of service delivery, the execution of activities, the quantity of services and products, the unit cost of each service, and so on.
We often use the concept of efficiency in our daily lives. For example, if a public welfare policy takes a short time from decision to implementation, we say that the administrative organization is efficient. But this is not an assessment of efficiency in the strict sense. Efficiency assessment of the efficiency of the description should have at least two characteristics: first, this description is quantitative rather than qualitative; second, this description reflects the overall rather than individual situation. This is a necessary requirement for organizational performance assessment.
Efficiency can generally be divided into two types: one is productive efficiency (productive efficiency), which refers to the average cost of time to produce or provide services; the other is allocative efficiency (allocative efficiency), which refers to the organization's provision of products or services to meet the different preferences of stakeholders. That is to say, among the various items provided by government departments, such as defense, education, health, etc., whether the proportion of budget allocation is in line with the order of preference of the people.
For example, the British government departments and the social science community have developed a complex set of technical methods for measuring efficiency over a long period of time. It involves a number of specialized concepts, such as "technical efficiency", "allocation efficiency", including different analytical techniques, such as regression analysis, data network analysis, comparative techniques between reference and non-reference systems, and so on.
3. Indicators of Benefit Assessment
Benefit assessment is concerned with the qualitative and social effects of the organization's work, i.e., the effectiveness of administration. Quantity without quality and efficiency without effectiveness are meaningless. Benefit assessment is the most important of the assessment components.
Administrative work is all-encompassing, and the nature of the work of different departments varies greatly, and thus the way in which their effectiveness is demonstrated is also different. For some administrative activities, its benefits can only be reflected through the quality of the output, while the benefits of some administrative activities can only be reflected in the social effects of the output. Generally speaking, one can measure social effects in two ways: first, whether the output of a management activity meets the needs of society or the public; and second, how much the output of this activity contributes to the realization of the established objectives. The former is a direct measurement and the latter is an indirect one, since the stated objectives are not always equivalent to objective effects, even though it is the pursuit of particular social effects that leads people to choose these objectives.
Benefits are also measured by a set of benefit indicators. The design of benefit indicators is very difficult and complex. The main reasons for the difficulty are: some measurements need to be compared with the established objectives, and the objectives are often not very clear, and not fully quantified; indicators require a quantitative description, and the quality and social effects are often difficult to quantify; social effects of the determination of the need to go outside of the administrative organization to collect the relevant information, this work is a huge expenditure, time-consuming and laborious; administrative activities of the social effects of the comparison of direct outputs with an obvious There is a significant time lag between the social effects of administrative activities and their direct outputs, and practice often requires that the benefits of certain activities be assessed before their social effects have been fully demonstrated. Some of the main popular practices are as follows:
(1) Quantitative qualitative demonstration. For example, in the assessment program formulated by the health and social insurance sector for the health care system, some indicators are formulated for the quality of hospital services, such as the number of deaths before and after surgery, unplanned readmissions, the rate of infection of patients in hospitals, immunization rates and so on. It can be seen that the quantification of quality can be analyzed and synthesized through a series of quantities to reflect the quality of a thing.
In areas where it is difficult to demonstrate directly and quantitatively, it is often necessary to use proxy or mediating indicators. Proxy indicators are indirect displays of qualitative or social effects. For example, the quality of graduates from different universities is difficult to measure and compare directly, so people use the employment rate of graduates in a certain period of time, the success rate of applying for employment, the average salary level of the first employment to measure indirectly. The intermediary indicator is to use intermediate effects to infer or predict the final social effects, and it is a measurement method designed to address the characteristic of lagging social effects of organizational outputs. For example, the ultimate social effect of traffic safety education is a reduction in the rate of traffic accidents. When the final social effect is not fully demonstrated, the public's understanding of traffic rules, the rate of drivers wearing seat belts, etc. can be used to measure the publicity effect. However, it is important to note that proxy and mediator indicators have their flaws, and thus such indicators should not be abused.
(2) Measuring effectiveness and service quality with public opinion polls. Since the purpose of administrative activities is to satisfy the needs of the society or the public, the best way to measure the social effectiveness and quality is to face the service users and find out their evaluation, their satisfaction level. Although the opinion poll method is highly favored, it has limitations, such as high cost and difficulty in being accurate and reliable due to the influence of public judgment. Moreover, the satisfaction of the beneficiaries does not answer the question - is this service being provided to those who need it most?
(3) Quality assurance system. Quality assurance is a complete set of quality control processes that should be applied primarily to those administrations engaged in volume processing and to public ****service organizations with a single nature of business. For those departments that have applied a quality assurance system, their performance evaluation pays attention only to efficiency.
4. Equity Assessment Indicators
In the new public **** management movement of the 1970s, the issue of equity began to receive increasingly widespread attention. As a result, equity assessment indicators became an important measure of government performance. Equity indicators focus on: "Are groups or individuals receiving services from the government being treated fairly? Do relatively disadvantaged groups in society have equal access to public **** services?" Thus, indicators of fairness usually refer to the justice received by groups or individuals receiving services from the administration, and generally cannot be spontaneously resolved by the market economy itself. Frederickson, a scholar of public *** administration, once put forward a composite theory of social equity, arguing that social equity can be categorized into the following types:
(1) Simple personal equity. It refers to one-to-one personal fair relations, such as the number of each person's access to a certain public **** goods or equality of opportunity.
(2) Divisionalized equity. It refers to fair relations under the same category, such as farmers and merchants have different tax rates and salary levels, which is the actual fairness caused by the basic division of labor.
(3) Group equity. It refers to the equity demanded by groups or sub-groups, such as the blacks' demand for equal access to public ****services with the whites, and equal government unemployment benefits for women and men.
(4) Equity of opportunity. Each person has different talents and develops differently later in life, but if both have the same opportunity to compete for some administrative position, it is equal opportunity.
(5) Generational equity. Refers to equity between the current generation and future generations.
At present, it is quite common for American administrative agencies to use the 3E indicators for performance evaluation, of which at least 68% of government agencies use the "effectiveness" indicators, 14% use the "economic indicators", and 8% use the "efficiency" indicators. At least 68% of government agencies use "effectiveness" indicators, 14% use "economic indicators", and 8% use "efficiency" indicators. It can be seen that different government departments can choose different indicators to evaluate administrative performance according to their own characteristics. Procedures of administrative performance evaluation