Luigi Boggian (UCLouvain) and Giovanni Righetti (University of Verona) took part in an ideas contest organized by lavoce.info. The theme of the contest was "Public sector booster of development". Luigi and Giovanni's project was judged the best and they were awarded a prize on September 26. Recently their idea has been published on Lavoce.info (in Italian).
You will find below a brief summary in English:
The introduction of performance indicators in the Italian public sector could trigger and encourage management accountability, while boosting a proactive citizenship. A higher transparency would also allow citizens and stakeholders to lobby and advocate for a better quality of public services.
Italy ranks very low among EU member states when looking at the efficiency level of the public sector. This is cause for concern as the local public administration efficiency is believed to affect firms’ productivity growth and the firm-level labour productivity. The approach we suggested aims at collecting and releasing information about the actual performance of the public sector’s management and services provision. In particular, an appointed body (most likely the Italian National Institute of Statistics, ISTAT), would identify relevant indicators suitable for every service and would deliver them to the general public. In addition to that, a benchmark value (regional, national, and European averages, for instance) would be associated to every figure. That would encourage individuals to directly compare what has been done for the community and what is the standard in the neighbouring communities. As a direct consequence, politicians would be held accountable for unsatisfactory levels of efficiency with respect to these indicators. To further prompt efficiency through economic incentives, we also suggest linking part of the allocation of funds across public administration entities to the improvement in their performance levels. In conclusion, this approach would also imply the collection useful data allowing to delve into the connexion between public sector efficiency and economic development.