Linking municipal Best Value and market performance: the Portuguese experience

ABSTRACT

Local municipalities are the public sector organizations closest to citizens and therefore they have the first responsibility for solving citizens’ problems and needs. The Best Value framework, developed in the UK, has been a useful tool for improving local services. This paper reports on an evaluation of the impact of the Best Value framework on Portuguese municipalities. Four hypotheses about the impact of the four pillars (the ‘Four Cs’) of Best Value on market performance were tested through structural path analysis. The results show that ‘challenge’ and ‘consult’ had a significant and positive impact on market performance, whereas ‘compare’ and ‘compete’ did not have a significant impact.

IMPACT

Using the Best Value framework improved Portuguese local municipalities’ market performance. The use of benchmarking was particularly successful. Local public authorities worldwide should definitely be questioning themselves about the services they provide and to what extent these services are responding to their citizens’ needs and problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Best Value
• market performance
• municipal services
• PLS-SEM
• Portugal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).