PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT IN AUSTRALIAN AND HONG KONG GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS

If academic research on performance measurement is to benefit the wider global community, an examination of its implementation under various contexts is vital. This paper, which focuses on the performance measurement systems of Australian and Hong Kong government departments, aims to just do this. Although both countries adopt an outputs-and-outcomes performance measurement framework, Australia's devolved approach to performance measurement contrasts that that of Hong Kong's centralized approach. This paper evaluates their performance measurement systems against five commonly recommended criteria for performance measures: validity, legitimacy, credibility, public accessibility, and functionality. Several criteria were found to interact with one another, suggesting that one cannot always get away with focusing on some of the features in a performance measurement system at the expense of other features. The similarities and differences found in the performance measurement systems between both countries are also discussed.