Assessing Financial Performance of Municipalities through Considering the Defined Indexes in Tehran Municipality

Various indexes and methods of assessing the performance of municipalities have beendeveloped across the globe; however, the municipalities in Iran are just at thebeginning of experiencing such an approach and most problems in urban managementof the nation are due to the managers’ lack of awareness of the organizationperformance, which in turn, is the direct result of insufficiency in defining indexes andmethods of assessing performance. Despite the importance attached to assessingperformance issue, unfortunately, no general consensus has been made on the indexesfor assessing the performance of municipalities in Iran. Assessing performance isusually made in relation to purposes and resources and the municipality five-year planmay well help the managers, but, so far, not a scientific approach has been taken tosuch an assessment. Therefore, in order to define the very indexes, it is necessary that ageneral consensus be made so that comparing the performance of different sections ofthe municipality and that of the municipalities of different cities could be possible. Thecurrent article, assessing the financial performance in municipalities with regard to thedefined indexes in Tehran municipality, comes in two parts; the first part focuses onthe principles and methods of assessing the performance in public section like themethods of assessing performance in municipalities and the strong and weak points ofthem, and the second section introduces the indexes Tehran municipality has definedfor assessing financial performance.