Performance measurement: From internal management to external disclosure

This work aims at understanding, first of all, the origin of the interest doctrine and companies have demonstrated in the so called performance “measures”. For this reason, we try to focus on the enormous changes which characterized the latest decades and to understand their consequences on firm management. Once the relevance of new parameters as internal information is recognized, we wonder if it is worth including them in officially disclosed information. Some theoretical models are presented, in order to describe the use of performance “measures” and to define the main information categories to be given to external parties.