The ONS is developing measures to describe productivity change in the provision of public services. This article provides a first progress report on this new initiative. Productivity expresses the relationship between the inputs and outputs of a production process. Improved productivity comes about through, for instance, better capacity utilisation, economies of scale and the use of technical advances.
Using examples drawn from education, health, social security, the prison and fire services and the police, the article proposes procedures for measuring productivity and gives some examples of the data that would be used. It gives some examples of how the changing quality of some services might be captured statistically: this is necessary because better quality output is regarded as more output. In addition, the article explains how public services are represented in the national accounting framework.
No final results are presented in this article: this is a progress report on work in progress. The eventual aim is that the ONS will produce reliable annual estimates of productivity change and publish them regularly.
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