KOSTRA a system for reporting performance information from Norwegian municpalities

1
KOSTRA a system for reporting performance
information from Norwegian municpalities

• 19 May 2006
• Jan Persson
• Norwegian Ministry of Finance

2
Outline

• Structure of the Norwegian government
• Information gathering before KOSTRA
• Development of KOSTRA and data reported
• Benefits and limitations for the central
  government and for the muncipalities
• Future of KOSTRA

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Division of responsibilities for welfare services
between levels of government in Norway

• Central government
• The National Insurance Scheme
• Hospitals and specialized social services
• Higher education/universities,
• Labour market, refugees and immigrants
• The county authorities (19)
• Upper secondary school
• Culture
• The municipalities (431)
• Primary and lower secondary school
• Nurseries/kindergartens
• Care for the elderly, social services

4
Information gathering before KOSTRA

• Official statistics organized thematically
  (child-care, schooling etc.), not according to
  the administrative unit supplying the service
• Compartmentalized reporting meant lack of
  coherence between areas
• Cumbersome reporting for the municipalities
• The published information of limited value for
  the municipalities themselves

5
Development of KOSTRA

• The system has been in place since 2002.
• A cooperation between central and local
  government plus Statistics Norway
• 16 Task forces comprising stakeholders oversee
  work in individual sectors like schools,
  kindergartens, etc.
• The municipalities report electronically once a
  year
• Crucial for the system is that it includes
  electronic data reporting and rapid publishing
  (within 2 months) on the Internet

6
Data reported

• Hard data financial, production, productivity,
  service coverage
• Direct reporting from the municpalities is
  combined with demographic and other statistics
• Three levels of aggregation
• 40 Key performance indicators (over all income,
  expenditure, productivity.)
• 600- 700 indicators covering 16 service programs
• Elementary data from which the aggregates are
  derived

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Central government benefits and limitations

• Rationalized the collection and processing of
  data
• Contributed to uniform standards
• Contributed to a better understanding of the
  local government economy

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Municipalities - benefits and limitations

• lessened the administrative burden of reporting
• Tool for internal planning
• Possibility of benchmarking
• Facilitated network cooperation between
  municipalities

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The future of KOSTRA

• The system will gradually integrate more quality
  information
• KOSTRA will benefit from ongoing work on a new
  monitoring system for performance in the central
  government sector and from improvement in the
  treatment of the public sector in the National
  Accounts