Public Value as Indicator for Public Administration to Make Sustainable Decisions

This paper highlights the results of a research carried out to offer a new indicator for public administration performance, in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness in achieving the mandatory and voluntary tasks. The current situation of the public sector forces immediate measures to close the gap between revenues and expenses, to prevent further debts and regain freedom to act. Increasing complexity of mandatory tasks combined with maintenance of existent infrastructure are the current challenges of public administration. But exclusive focus to monetary values ignores the peculiar purpose of public administration and the challenges of the combination of economics and politics. Simple adoption of existent risk evaluation models leads to a limited view. To present an improved basis for appropriate decisions on parliamentary and administrative level, public value offers a second dimension beneath monetary judgment. First objective is to prove the current status of 'science' considering the term public value. Although the term was introduced 20 years ago and by application of the New Public Management (NPM) principles the public sector is in a transition, performance measurement remains vague. A theoretical approach is used to show the spectrum of public value used for economic purposes in order to evaluate the consequences and magnitude of current status and potential decisions. Different appraisals are compared to show limits, and to further focus on public value maximization. econd is to enlighten the consequences of decisions in the meaning of deviation from public value. The transformation of given public administration targets by execution of political programs creates changes. These processes cope with desired and non-desired directions, concerning utility to the population. Individual and collective articulated public interests are first indicators, while public value - as term - is created by private and public organizations, by the society or by individuals. Third objective is to convert the evaluation of public value deviation by decisions in numeric indicators for further application in public administration risk management systems, and for better in-sight of possible consequences to politicians and public managers. Further to the evaluation of the decisions ramification in order to enhance the basement of decisions by similar expected courses of actions. The use of public value as indicator will contribute to a comprehensive analysis of economic status and to citizen-valued distribution of the scarce resources by public administration. The result will contribute to enhancing the grade of efficiency in distribution of resources, in the sense of increasing of individual and collective public value.