Multiple Corporate Objectives and Performance Contracts: The case of Philippine Government Financial Institutions

Al-Habbyel Yusoph (University of the Philippines)

This paper explores how Philippine government financial institutions (GFIs) balance their multiple and conflicting objectives by examining their performance contracts with the government. GFIs and other state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are often mandated to pursue other goals aside from profit maximization. In 2011, the government institutionalized reforms in the corporate governance of its SOEs and, in 2014, implemented performance contract agreements which required GFIs to develop balanced scorecards following Kaplan and Norton (1992).  Using various corporate governance and goal-setting theories, this paper reviews the performance contracting process and twenty-three (23) actual balanced scorecards. The review finds that GFIs have different priorities, with social and financial goals having the highest weights. With the use of balanced scorecards, GFIs were able to solve their multiple objective problems by specifying the tradeoffs and developing a single annual objective score. First-year results of the performance contracts indicate that GFIs might be gaming the goal-setting process and exhibiting “ratchet effects”. Finally, this paper recommends that (1) the government review GFI objectives, especially with regard to the primacy of financial goals over non-financial goals, and that (2) control and quality measures be added to ensure that performance contracts are effective.

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