News from the journals

摘要

In the current issue of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A (Statistics in Society), the report of the Society's Working Party on Performance Monitoring (PM) in the Public Services is presented. Performance indicators: good, bad and ugly examines the rise of performance monitoring in the UK during the 1990s, identifies common problems and makes specific recommendations for the future. Among these recommendations are that PM procedures should have detailed protocols and clearly specified objectives, that they should be so designed that counter-productive behaviour is discouraged, and that they should be reported in a way that includes measures of uncertainty.