The European Accounting Review 2001, 10:3, 505–522 Caught in an evaluatory trap: a dilemma for public services under NPFM Olov Olson School of Economics and Commercial Law, Go¨teborg University, Sweden Christopher Humphrey The University of Manchester, England James Guthrie Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Sydney, Australia ABSTRACT This paper presents a challenge to public sector managers, policy-makers and interested academics. Drawing on the ndings of previous international comparative studies of new public nancial management (NPFM) reforms, it concludes that public services and their providers are caught in an ‘evaluatory trap’. The continual promotion of NPFM reforms, despite their evident repeated failure to meet specied achievements, is argued to be generating a cycle of ever-decreasing public services at ever-increasing costs per service unit. As the legitimacy of public services increasingly rests on the need to be seen as efcient and effective and as denitions of efciency frequently demand adoption of the latest set of NPFM reforms, it follows that the future for public services is in question. 1. INTRODUCTION Recent international comparative work (e.g., see Olson et al., 1998; Guthrie et al., 1999; Jones et al., 2001) has shown the wide diversity of reform practice in public sector management, even across countries labelled as ‘active’ reformers. It has also revealed the signicant inuence of accounting-based ‘nancial manage- ment’ techniques in processes of new public management (NPM), to the point where nancial management is regarded as the technical ‘lifeblood’ of many of the NPM organizational structures (Guthrie et al., 1999: 211). Prior Address for correspondence Professor Christopher Humphrey, The University of Manchester, Mezzanine Floor, Crawford House, Booth Street East, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. Copyright # 2001 European Accounting Association ISSN 0963-8180 print = 1468-4497 online DOI: 10.1080 = 09638180120088303 Published by Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd on behalf of the EAA