Are You Being Served? New Tools for Measuring Services Delivery

Abstract

This volume provides an overview of a range of tools for measuring service delivery and offers valuable lessons on the opportunities and constraints practitioners face in measuring performance. The authors investigate country cases using data from a range of sources in a variety of contexts. Their experiences yield important insights on how to avoid pitfalls, what practices to improve, and how to learn the most from the data at hand. Taken together, those lessons represent an important step in strengthening accountability and governance so as to enhance service delivery. Empirical investigations of the relationship between particular characteristics of the public provisioning of goods and services at the local level and the characteristics of the localities receiving these goods and services may help us understand the impact of policy and learn to design more effective public interventions. Monitoring data are an integral part of the process of learning about the performance of any social program. Many impact evaluations of social programs assume that the interventions occur at specified launch dates and produce equal and constant changes in conditions among eligible beneficiary groups.