Goal Setting and Performance Assessment in Municipal Budgeting

Abstract

O ver the past 30 years there has been a series of attempts to make federal policy formulation more rational and the delivery of public services more efficient. The budgetary process has been the vehicle for many of these reform efforts because of its routine and recurring nature, and more importantly, because of its firmly established timetable.' Thus, the 1950s brought performance and an emphasis on measuring governmental output and comparing it to the amount of resources devoted to its production. This was succeeded by a very ambitious undertaking, the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System (PPBS), in the 1960s.2 Following abandonment of PPBS in the early 1970s, the Nixon Administration attempted, without success, to implement Management-by-Objectives (MBO) in the federal government.3 More recently, Jimmy Carter brought zero base budgeting (ZBB) to Washington after having experimented with it in Georgia state government.4