Abstract

National Science and Technology Award System（NSTAS）is a very important part of China's policy for science and technology as well as a major leverage for macro-control of the development of national science and technology. After more than 60 years of development, particularly after 30 years of reform and opening-up, NSTAS is gradually growing to be a complete system. Now NSTAS has five national level science and technology awards:National Supreme Science and Technology Award, National Natural Science Award, National Technology Invention Award, National Science and Technology Progress Award and International Science and Technology Cooperation Award. Each year, hundreds of millions of yuan is invested in the cause of science and technology award. Adding to that human resources, materials and all other tangible and intangible inputs, the total investment is tremendous. However, despite the enormous investment, NSTAS has only limited influence on science and technology, economy and culture, which is far less than expected. Thus, the performance evaluation and optimization of NSTAS can not only encourage scientists and researchers to be more proactive and creative, but also enable the award system to meet more social needs.

The theory of performance evaluation involves the nature of award, effect of award, function of award, control of award, structure of award system, and procedure and approach of performance evaluation. After three developmental stages of ‘start and explore, recover and develop, reform and improve', NSTAS established a complete and relatively fixed program, including three parts: recommendation, review and award. There are eight factors influencing the performance of NSTAS, namely rationality of award setting, coordination of award objects, appropriateness of awarding time, stringency of award candidacy criteria, effectiveness of incentives, rigor of appraisal process, scientific soundness of appraisal index, and appropriateness of work division. Among them, rationality of award setting, coordination of award objects, appropriateness of work division and performance are inversely related, while others and performance are positively related.

The appraisal indexes of the performance of NSTAS can be divided into two categories: award input and award output. Award input is measured by three factors: human resource, capital and facility input. Award output is also measured by three factors: the number of awarded projects, the number of awardees and effect of award. Every second level index has several third level indexes. The author calculates and determines the weight coefficient of each appraisal index by AHP model and yaahp 0. 5. 2 software. From 1979 to 2011, the performance of NSTAS never achieved technological effectiveness and scope effectiveness simultaneously, which means that award input was excessive and award output was relatively insufficient. National Natural Science Award costs the most in terms of both awarded items and the number of awardees. In other words, the number of winner of National Natural Science Award should increase under certain award incentives. From every year's award slack variable, we can see that human resource and capital are the top two excessive inputs while facility input is relatively insufficient, which indicates that the need for modernization and informationization is urgent and output indexes such as the number of awarded projects, the number of awardees and effect of award have the potential to rise.

One approach to improving NSTAS performance is to minimize the excessiveness of award input while maintaining the existing award output, which means the reduction of human resource, capital and facility input. Another approach is to keep current award input and simultaneously maximize award output, such as increasing awarded projects and awardees, optimizing effect of award. Nevertheless, the performance optimization should be implemented for overall award system in accordance with the systems theory, rather than solely rely on the improvement of a single factor or appraisal index. Therefore, in order to optimize the performance of NSTAS, we should reinforce its reform and improvement, enhance its informationization and improve its quality management system.