Fruitful comparisons

By Maria Ortiz Perez
May 13th, 2010

Today, Pioneer released a new report on economic growth in Massachusetts Middle Cities. I am very pleased with this report especially since it walks the reader through a very clear methodology on how to benchmark cities in a way that makes sense.

Whenever advocates and practitioners of performance measurement meet, the cliche  “apples to apples vs. orange to apples”  inevitably comes up. In Municipal Benchmarks for Massachusetts Middle Cities: A Look at Economic Growth, the author compares the performance of a city to itself through time, or in other words, a “seed to apple” comparison.

For example, a 10% vacancy rate in city A doesn’t sound that great when we compare it to the 6% rate in city B. But when we find out that ten years ago vacancy rate was 9% in city A and 1 % in city B, then it is a whole different story.

The goal of this paper is not to give the ultimate answer on how to measure performance in municipalities. It is useful however since it makes us think on our approach to benchmarking. It encourages us to resist the pull of jumping to conclusions just by looking at numbers and categorize cities as “better than or worse than”. It takes us through the story behind the data, and highlights the good results that some municipalities have achieved in the face of very challenging scenarios.

If you want to take a look at the data itself, visit www.MassCityStats.org