Empirical evidence of the effects of performance-based public management is scarce. This report describes a framework used to organize available empirical information on one form of performance-based management, a performance-based accountability system (PBAS). Such a system identifies individuals or organizations that must change their behavior for the performance of an activity to improve, chooses an implicit or explicit incentive structure to motivate these organizations or individuals to change, and then chooses performance measures tailored to inform the incentive structure appropriately. The study focused on systems in the child-care, education, health-care, public health emergency preparedness, and transportation sectors, mainly in the United States. Analysts could use this framework to seek empirical information in other sectors and other parts of the world. Additional empirical information could help refine existing PBASs and, more broadly, improve decisions on where to initiate new PBASs, how to implement them, and then how to design, manage, and refine them over time.

The Army must transform its institutional activities to align them with operating forces to improve support and release resources from institutional activities. This document is the executive summary for MG-530-A, What the Army Needs to Know to Align Its Operational and Institutional Activities, which provides a model for evaluating value chains to promote the alignment of needs and resources.

This technical report explains an analytic way to design and assess packages of financial incentives that the government can use to cost effectively promote early experience with coal-to-liquids (CTL) production of liquid fuels in the face of significant uncertainty about the future. The report applies two complementary analytic methods. The first uses observations from successful voluntary agreements in the commercial world to identify principles that the government can use to design a relationship with a private investor that is likely to ensure that early CTL production experience occurs cost effectively. Such a relationship yields investor and government behavior that, in turn, generates a set of cash flows to and from investor and government over time. The second analytic method takes these cash flows as given and assesses their effects on the investor and the government. It measures effects on an investor in terms of changes in the investor's real (adjusted for inflation) after-tax internal rate of return (IRR). It measures effects on the government in terms of changes in the real net present value (NPV) of cash flows to and from the government when assessed at the discount rate set by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for investments of this kind. The cash-flow analysis focuses on a hypothetical CTL combined-cycle production plant that uses a Fischer-Tropsch (FT) technology to convert coal into about 30,000 barrels per day (bpd) of diesel and naphtha; significant amounts of electricity, some of which can be sold off site; and carbon dioxide, which can be sequestered or sold for use in enhanced oil recovery (EOR) off site.

The Army must transform its institutional activities to align them with operating forces to improve support and release resources from institutional activities. This document provides a model for evaluating value chains to promote the alignment of needs and resources according to three representational institutional Army activities: medical services, enlisted accessioning, and short-term acquisition.

Record-high world oil prices have prompted renewed interest in producing liquid fuels from coal. The United States leads the world in recoverable coal reserves. Moreover, the technology for converting coal to liquid fuels already exists, and production costs appear competitive at world oil prices well below current levels. Yet, despite its promise, private investment in coal-to-liquids (CTL) technology is being impeded by three uncertainties: where oil prices are heading, what it actually costs to produce coal-derived fuels, and how greenhouse-gas emissions will be regulated. A domestic CTL industry could produce as much as three million barrels per day of transportation fuels by 2030. Having such an industry would yield important energy security benefits, most notably a lowering of world oil prices and a decrease in wealth transfers from oil users to oil producers. But establishing a large CTL industry also raises important policy and environmental issues associated with climate change, coal mining, and water consumption. Weighing both benefits and costs, it makes sense for the United States to pursue an insurance or hedge strategy that promotes the early construction and operation of a limited number of commercial CTL plants. This book presents an in-depth review of the prospects of and policy, governance, and environmental issues associated with establishing a CTL industry in the United States. -- provided by publisher.

The briefing finds there is a great heterogeneity in the current use of contractors at Air Force installations, both across and within commands and functions.

This report explains how demand functions can be used properly to measure policy-induced changes in consumer surplus. For the most part, it brings together existing results from the economics literature and presents them in a common, systematic framework. Its goal is to provide the practicing policy analyst with a rigorous and intuitive understanding of the most common measures of consumer surplus used today. Section II develops the concept of consumer surplus at the level of the individual and contrasts the concepts associated with Hicks, Marshall, and Harberger. Section III explains how these concepts are related to different kinds of demand curves and to areas to the left of policy-induced consumption loci. Section IV discusses how to aggregate measures of consumer surplus across individuals and integrates the notion of consumer surplus with more general concerns about how policies affect social welfare. Section V closes the report with some notes on how to choose a measure of consumer surplus for a particular policy problem.

In its performance-based services acquisitions activites, the Air Force focuses on telling a provider what the Air Force needs rather than how the provider should meet that need.

The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 (PURPA) requires that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission collect various data on costs of service from utilities. The exact methodology of collection was left largely up to FERC. In this paper we make some specific recommendations on the way this data collection activity should be arranged. In view of the costs of collecting, storing, and disseminating large amounts of data, we recommend that only demonstratably useful data is collected. Further, FERC should consider sampling techniques in order that unnecessary costs are not imposed on utilities. In addition, the possibility of synchronizing these data collection activities with ordinary rate hearings should not be overlooked. We recommend that careful consideration be given to the need for collecting much of the traditional accounting cost categories. The intent of PURPA in Sec. 115 (a)(2) seems to definitely emphasize the need for economically based marginal costs information. Marginal cost information is difficult to collect in a standardized form and careful analysis of the methodology and accuracy of the collected data will be required. It is this difficulty that makes collection during regulatory hearings attractive as the assumptions behind the cost measurements can be scrutinized. Finally there would seem to be good reason for FERC to consider collecting interchange data that is consistent with the other data so that bulk power rates can also be analysed.