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Tijdschrift voor Economie en Management
Vol. LI, 3, 2006


“Advancing Public Sector Performance”

Introducing the special issue in honour of
Professor Dr. Wim Moesen

Guest editors L. CHERCHYE and T. VAN PUYENBROECK







Wim Moesen would single out conventions as primary examples of soft
institutions. One such commonsensible convention is that a collection of
scientific papers, published in someone’s honour, is not a haphazard
compilation. Rather, such articles must be related to a ‘unifying theme’ that
runs as a common thread through that particular person’s professional life.
Adhering to that custom was rather easy in this particular instance: this
special issue of the Tijdschrift voor Economie en Management deals, as Wim
Moesen has always done, with the central question how to assess and improve
the performance of government.
Phrased in such a concise manner, this theme may sound as a rather
down-to-earth preoccupation, as a shallow basis on which to build a long and
impressive career. But by no means is this how Wim himself approaches the
issue. His work is rooted in the deep conviction that government is indeed
there for the citizens, that better government implies more ‘value for money’

for these citizens, and so, ultimately, that any way in which the performance
of government can be enhanced helps to increase citizens’ welfare. In short,
the government is merely a servant. And although it is only an educated
guess, we dare to add that Wim personally went one step further along this
line of thinking: if government, as any institution, is indeed a contrivance with
instrumental value for society, we in turn may not escape the civic duty to try
and make that government better. We should impose standards of excellence
on it; we must permanently answer the question how government can be
improved in being at our service.
Laurens Cherchye
Catholic University of Leuven Center
for Economic Studies, Leuven and
Flemish Fund for Scientific Research
(FWO-V), Brussels
Tom Van Puyenbroeck
European University College Brussels

(EHSAL), Brussels
In fact, we think that it is the same sense of civic duty which led him
to take up some positions as policy advisor in various ‘real-life’ committees,
and to provide occasional comments in the media on the state of our (national,
regional, local) governments’ public finances and those who administer them.
Even when it comes to his much appreciated teaching activities, we would not
be surprised to discover that he was driven by yet the same motivation. For,
being well-versed in the classics, Wim Moesen surely knows Aristotle’s
aphorism that “the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”
Government is of course a powerful servant, as it serves us in
multiple ways. ‘Focusing’ on the performance of government is therefore, to
some extent, a misnomer. Wim Moesen indeed studied various aspects of this
versatile agent. Within the general theme of this issue, we can distinguish

three main lines of research that can be used to classify his own work. First,
Wim has been concerned with defining the central role of the government
within an economy. Accordingly, much of his research has been devoted to
the measurement of public sector macro-performance, i.e. the aggregate
achievements at the level of a country or region as a whole. In a first step,
such an aggregation exercise requires the identification of the appropriate
performance criteria and the corresponding performance indicators. In a
subsequent step, this means aggregating the thus defined single-dimensional
performance indicators in a synthesizing, so-called “composite”, performance
indicator. Second, and closely related to this first research avenue, an
important part of Wim’s work has concentrated on the quantification of public
sector micro-performance; i.e., most notably, the productive efficiency
measurement of specific public service production units. The act of
measurement itself is rather technical, and must obey some methodological
rules. Here, Wim always kept an eye on the ultimate purpose of that act:
methodologies are good if they can establish a coherent basis for policy
improvement. Indeed, Wim surely went beyond measurement for its own
sake. This is evident if one looks at a third line of his research, also taken up
in this special issue, which deals with explaining public sector performance.
That is, what are the ultimate determinants of economic performance in
general, and public policy successes or failures in particular? In this respect,
Wim has put a main emphasis on the quality of institutions as an important
driver of economic prosperity.
This three-way categorization is ours, not his, and we are well aware
that it is a limited way of summarizing the vast spectrum of research subjects
that Wim has covered throughout his career. We could as well have said that
by writing on institutional aspects, their relation with the size of government
and with economic growth, models of bureaucracy, budgetary policy and
budgetary norms, public debt and debt management, privatisation, public
auditing and the search for best practices, social inclusion, local public

finances, the quality of a trustworthy government, , he covered as good as
any chapter that one finds in a public finance textbook. Indeed, he is the co-
author of one such textbook, as many generations of Flemish students and
policy-makers know. Alternatively, we could have pointed at the international
journals (European Economic Review, European Journal of Law and
Economics, Journal of Common Market Studies, European Economy, Public
Choice, Der Öffentlichen Sektor, ), national journals, and books in which
his texts appeared. But, for better or for worse, we will use the above
categorization of Wim’s research to classify the six papers that follow in this
issue.
The first three papers, by Herman Van Rompuy (“Lessen uit dertig
jaar openbare financiënpraktijk”), Andrea Saltelli, Guiseppe Munda and
Michela Nardo (“From complexity to multidimensionality: the role of
composite indicators for advocacy of EU reform”) and Geert Bouckaert
(“Prestaties en prestatiemanagement in de publieke sector”), deal with the role
of the government and the general assessment of public sector performance.
The authors are either prime policy-makers themselves or prime witnesses of
and important advisors to actual policy-making. Just as Wim, they bear on
the public debate, and they bear on it by virtue of the quality of their
arguments.
Herman Van Rompuy, minister of state, MP, is evidently extremely
well-positioned to provide an assessment of Belgium’s federal and regional
budgetary policy over the last decades. Distilled from his long life in the
political trenches, he conveys to the reader the lessons which he has learned
regarding practical public finance policies. The resulting text may rightly be
considered as ‘a young person’s guide to the actual do’s and don’ts in
budgetary policy’, so nicely mirroring the approach Wim Moesen is often
keen to take when explaining inherently complex issues to a wide audience.
Andrea Saltelli, Guiseppe Munda and Michela Nardo, who currently
are all working at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra,

Italy, and who have collaborated with Wim on the development of composite
indicators, explore in their article to what extent such composite indicators are
‘useful’. As mentioned above, such a question epitomizes much of Wim’s
own work. Specifically, noting that composite indicators are (‘only’) capable
of aggregating multi-dimensional processes into simplified, stylized concepts,
these authors provide a qualified yes to the question whether these tools are
up to the task of underpinning the development of data based narratives for
political advocacy of the EU reform process as laid down in the Lisbon
agenda.
‘Advancing public sector performance’ is a concern that is certainly
not confined to public economics. At another faculty of Wim’s Alma Mater,
this field of study is indeed equally alive. Specifically within the field of
public administration, Geert Bouckaert is an internationally renowned expert
on public performance management. His article not only neatly summarizes
the current state-of-the-art –of the theory and practice– of public performance
management. Bouckaert rightly warns for the danger of vagueries, points at
possible undesirable side-effects of performance-oriented management, and
also indicates the main challenges ahead regarding the further implementation
of such management.
Bouckaert’s survey article also marks the transition to the second
part of this issue, in which the focus is shifted towards micro-assessments of
the public sector. The next two articles, by Claude Jeanrenaud and Mathieu
Vuilleumier (“Evaluating technical efficiency of Swiss consulates”) and
Laurens Cherchye, Bruno De Borger and Tom Van Puyenbroeck
(“Nonparametric tests of Optimizing Behaviour in Public Service Provision:
Methodology and an application to local public safety”), provide two
applications of the assessment of public sector productive efficiency. Both
papers use the ‘best practice frontier’ methodological framework that Wim
Moesen has used and advocated many times as well.
In 1990, Claude Jeanrenaud of the University of Neuchâtel,

Switzerland, and Wim Moesen co-edited the book ‘Gérer l'austérité
budgétaire’ (Paris, Economica). This joint product points at the fact that both
share similar research interests. The text contained in this issue, by
Jeanrenaud and Vuilleumier provides further evidence for this. Just as Wim
Moesen has studied e.g. the productive performance of municipalities or of
tax collecting offices, Jeanrenaud and Vuilleumier compare the relative
performances of a sample of 28 Swiss consular posts in Europe, North
America and Asia using an input-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA)
model. The aim of this study is to compute for each post the minimum amount
of input – Swiss employees and locally hired staff and to help the Swiss
Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) to control the efficiency of worldwide
staff deployment. They also compare the results of their DEA analysis with
those of the DFA’s audit unit, which employs a different methodology.
Bruno De Borger has been a colleague of Wim Moesen at the
University of Antwerp for many years. They have been working and
publishing together on the topic of public sector productivity measurement, in
particular using the DEA methodology. Laurens Cherchye and Tom Van
Puyenbroeck are two former PhD students of Wim Moesen, and still enjoy
collaborating with him on a regular basis. In their article, Cherchye, De
Borger and Van Puyenbroeck suggest a DEA-related methodology that
models public sector behaviour as “shadow” cost minimizing behaviour for
given, pre-specified public policy objectives. Using data of 546 municipal
policy forces, they find that this model provides a good fit of observed public
sector behaviour. In line with Wim Moesen’s study of the subject, this so-
called “positive” approach to public sector evaluation recognizes the
specificity of the production process (as compared to the more typical private
sector production processes) in defining the performance standards for public
sector production units.
These first five articles focus on the definition and measurement of
public sector performance. The final article, by André Van Poeck, Jacques

Vanneste and Maret Veiner (“Exchange market pressure in the formerly
planned Central and Eastern European countries: the role of institutions”), fits
within the third line of Wim Moesen’s research as it has been classified
above. Specifically, it concentrates on the role of institutions as determinants
of economic performance.
André Van Poeck, Jacques Vanneste and Maret Veiner are all
members of the economics department of the University of Antwerp, to which
Wim himself has been associated for many years. André Van Poeck and Wim
Moesen have co-authored several introductory economics textbooks, and so
introduced the principles of economics to many generations of undergraduate
students. Jacques Vanneste is again a former PhD student of Wim, who has
shown a similar interest in the study of public sector performance. This
resulted in a number of joint publications. The article of Van Poeck, Vanneste
and Veiner focuses on how the institutional developments in the formerly
planned Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) impact on their
exchange markets. More specifically, these authors investigate whether
institutional reforms such as economic liberalization, improved corporate
governance, banking sector reform, improvements of rule of law and pushing
back corruption have affected tensions on the currencies of these countries.
Their results effectively confirm that low corruption, efficient banking
regulatory and supervisory systems and profound economic liberalization
significantly reduce exchange market pressure in the transition economies.
These findings are consistent with the more general thesis that good
institutions benefit the economic (policy) performance, which is actually a
basic ingredient of Wim Moesen’s own work on the topic.
To conclude, we hope that the next few articles in this issue provide
an adequate, albeit not fully representative, sampling of Wim Moesen’s many
research interests. In particular, we hope that Wim will enjoy this special
issue, and that the subsequent studies may provide inspiration for his own
future work.