The Objectives and Indicators of the French Budget Act (LOLF): Four Years On

In a previous article, published in the June 2006 issue (No. 117) of the Revue francaise d’administration publique, devoted to the Constitutional Bylaw on Budget Acts (LOLF), the author analysed a random sample of 32 of the indicators introduced in the Programme to assess the annual performance of the 2006 Budget Act. Few of these were considered satisfactory with regard to the principles stipulated when the LOLF was implemented, and half of them were seen as not relevant or even misleading in terms of public action. In 2010, an analysis of the continued use of these indicators (and the abandonment of 15 of them) over four budget periods, and a comparison with two similar exercises (the Quality and Efficiency Programmes introduced by the Social Security Finance Bills and the indicators of the National Sustainable Development Strategy) allow new conclusions to be drawn which shed further light on the pre-requisites for the success of these “new public management” exercises.