Les indicateurs de performance en matière de politiques sociales. Quel sens pour l'action publique ?

The French new budgetary architecture includes, for Social security as for government spending, a set of objectives and indicators, whose purpose is to assess performance of public policies. This paper looks through the indicators issued in 2009 in the fields of social and health policies. Considering the State budget, it shows that the indicators implemented are often inadequate to measure outcomes of public intervention and may raise problems of interpretation. Considering Social security expenditure, the set of indicators appears more interesting and consistent, but it remains in some respects a ?political exercise?. In any case, using indicators to assess the performance of social policies needs caution, because of the complexity of their objectives and the multiplicity of actors involved at different levels. It cannot replace, and even appeals multidimensional evaluation, independently established. JEL Classification: E6, F3, F5.