Productivity Analysis: A Search for Definition and Order

Abstract

In the 1972 Public Administration Review symposium on government productivity, Edward K. Hamilton commented that: public is now assailed by more irrelevant facts, half facts, and non-facts on this subject than on any issue in public affairs. ' It would be comforting to report that in the intervening five years issues have been clarified, concepts uniformly defined, academics and practitioners have come to agreement, and productivity improvements have been registered in federal, state, and local governments. Unfortunately, the entire subject seems to be in greater and greater disarray. A review of the expanding literature indicates that productivity is characterized as related to or defined by the following terms: efficiency, effectiveness, cost savings, program evaluation, work measurement, employee incentives, management effectiveness, input-output analysis, work standards, and the political/social environment. It is measured at various levels of organizational performance by a wide variety of techniques. Productivity improvement in government is obviously a virtue worth pursuing. But sometimes it becomes an empty phrase that embraces almost any change the better in a federal, state, or local government program. The present authors are not sufficiently pretentious to think that they can bring order out of this conceptual chaos. The objective here is a very modest one-to review first the economic characteristics of public-sector output that contribute to the confusion and, second, to review some of the attempts that have been made to introduce conceptual clarity to the field. The third section of this paper will attempt a taxonomy of productivity approaches. The paper will conclude with some observations on the near-term outlook for productivity improvement in government, with special reference to the state/local sector.

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