Issue № 67. April 2018

Tools for Estimation of the Russian Government Programs

Ph.D., Associate Professor, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russian Federation.
E-mail: ga.borshchevskiy@migsu.ranepa.ru

In this article we are studying the practice of implementing and evaluating the effectiveness of government programs in Russia from 2011 to the present. Our sources were the materials of the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia, the legal acts, and the official statistics. The results of this paper are some proposals for  public administration practitioners. We found out that in the assessment methodologies the emphasis is on formative indicators, and not on achieving socially significant results. Also we discovered that the number of target indicators of programs had increased in 2013–2016, but the level of achievement of these target indicators, contrary, has decreased. An empirical link exists between the level of program effectiveness and the dynamics of development of the relevant sectors or regions. We propose to include this criterion in the methodology for the evaluation of the government programs. We also found out that the majority of target indicators of public programs do not correspond to indicators of federal statistical observation. The use of the official statistics for the programs evaluation gives some preferences. Firstly, it will reduce the costs of programs evaluation. Secondly, it will increase the objectivity of the evaluation, and, thirdly, it will assess the program activities coherence with the dynamics of socio-economic development indicators. Finally, it allows estimate the contribution of programs to the development of relevant sectors or regions by comparing the values of statistical indicators before, during and after the implementation of programs. We proved the existence of a relationship between the effectiveness of the activities of responsible program executors and the effectiveness of their implementation. The complexity of interagency interaction among program participants reduces the effectiveness of its implementation, but the lack of the need for such interactions generates the voluntarism of responsible executors. It seems advisable to strengthen the relationship between the results of the implementation of the government programs and the activities of the implementing bodies.

Keywords

Government program, program-target planning, ex-ante and ex-post evaluation, results management, efficiency.