Performance measurement and budgeting systems: the perspective of Georgia state agencies

For the past fifty years, many budget reforms have ebbed and flowed around what is probably the most important theme in contemporary public budgeting: to integrate information about agency and program performance into the budget process. Past research on this subject has focused mostly on the roles and perspectives of central executive and legislative budget analysts in the performance budgeting process. This dissertation examines the role and perspective of state agencies in the process of developing and implementing performance budgeting. This dissertation, based upon elite interviews and surveys of Georgia state agency budget officers, finds that the design of performance measures is largely an agency-centered process, and that managerial capability, external performance culture and measurement quality are the top three factors that lead agencies to embrace performance budgeting.