Are you being Served: New Tools for Measuring Service Delivery

Experience shows that increasing government spending on public services alone is not sufficient to raise standards of living and improve access to health, education, and other public services. Although significant strides have been made in expanding access to education and health services in the past decade,the quality of those services remains a serious concern. Strengthening accountability and supporting governance reforms in service delivery are thus major priorities for the World Bank and its development partners.

A wide array of instruments has been developed in an effort to measure the performance and quality of public services. However,our knowledge of how to use and customize those new tools to country circumstances and of the limited available data is still at a basic level. This knowledge poses a key challenge because many of the policy options for reducing poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals rely on improving the supply and quality of public services.

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. They will, we hope, lead to an important advance in our thinking.