Efficiency in the Public Sector
Efficiency in the Public Sector

Author: Kevin J. Fox

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1475735928

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Regardless of where we live, the management of the public sector impacts on our lives. Hence, we all have an interest, one way or another, in the achievement of efficiency and productivity improvements in the activities of the public sector. For a government agency that provides a public service, striving for unreasonable benchmark targets for efficiency may lead to a deterioration of service quality, along with an increase in stress and job dissatisfaction for public sector employees. Slack performance targets may lead to gross inefficiency, poor quality of service, and low self-esteem for employees. In the case of regulation, inappropriate policies can lead to unprecedented disasters. Examples include the decimation of fish stocks through mismanagement of fisheries, and power blackouts through inappropriate restrictions on electricity generators and distributors. Efficient taxation policies minimise the tax bill for citizens. In all of these cases, efficient management is required, although it is often unclear how to assess this efficiency. In this volume, several authors consider various aspects and contexts of performance measurement. Hence, this volume represents a unique collection of advances in efficiency assessment for the public sector by leading researchers in the field. Efficiency in the Public Sector is divided into two sections. The first is titled "Issues in Public Sector Efficiency Evaluation" and comprises of chapters 1-4. The second section is titled "Efficiency Analysis in the Public Sector - Advances in Theory and Practice." This division is somewhat arbitrary, in the sense there are significant overlapping themes in both sections. However, it serves to separate chapters that can be characterised as dealing with broader issues (Section I), from chapters that can be characterised as focusing on specific theoretical problems and empirical cases (Section II).

Handbook on Public Sector Efficiency
Handbook on Public Sector Efficiency

Author: António Afonso

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2023-03-02

Total Pages: 459

ISBN-13: 1839109165

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Examining the increasingly relevant topic of public sector efficiency, this dynamic Handbook investigates the context of constrained fiscal space and public funding sources using cross-country datasets in areas including China, India and sub-Saharan Africa and OECD economies.

Public Sector Efficiency and Fiscal Austerity
Public Sector Efficiency and Fiscal Austerity

Author: International Monetary Fund

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 1998-04-01

Total Pages: 25

ISBN-13: 1451968515

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This paper uses a simple model to analyze the forces that determine the size of the public sector and the quality of workers employed in that sector. Workers are heterogeneous, and the public sector chooses an employment strategy that maximizes a social welfare function U(s, Y) that depends on the share of the labor force employed in public service s and private sector output Y. The government is fully informed about worker productivity. By examining the welfare properties of the possible outcomes, we are able to illuminate situations in which policies that seek to constrain the public sector may or may not improve economic efficiency.

The Politics of Public Sector Performance
The Politics of Public Sector Performance

Author: Michael Roll

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-10

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1317934547

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It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak. The public sector, in particular, is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical and frequently overlooked phenomenon: effective public organizations or ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in developing countries. Why do these pockets exist? How do they emerge and survive in hostile environments? And do they have the potential to trigger more comprehensive reforms and state-building? This book provides surprising answers to these questions, based on detailed case studies of exceptional public organizations and state-owned enterprises in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. The case studies are guided by a common analytical framework that is process-oriented and sensitive to the role of politics. The concluding comparative analysis develops a novel explanation for why some public organizations in the developing world beat the odds and turn into pockets of public sector performance and service delivery while most do not. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, development, organizations, public administration, public policy and management.

Performance-Based Budgeting in the Public Sector
Performance-Based Budgeting in the Public Sector

Author: Michiel S. de Vries

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-30

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 3030020770

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This book provides a comparative analysis of performance budgeting and financing implementation, and examines failures and successes across both developed and developing countries. Beginning with a review of theoretical research on performance budgeting and financing, the book synthesises the numerous studies on the subject. The book describes the situation in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Netherlands and Italy, as well as in seven developing countries - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia and South Africa, at the national, and at the local level. Each chapter provides historical and descriptive details of successful or failed experiments in performance budgeting and performance financing.

Does Public Sector Inefficiency Constrain Firm Productivity
Does Public Sector Inefficiency Constrain Firm Productivity

Author: Raffaela Giordano

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 2015-07-21

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13: 1513580639

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This paper studies the effect of public sector efficiency on firm productivity using data from more than 400,000 firms across Italy’s provinces. Exploiting the large heterogeneity in the efficiency of the public sector across Italian provinces and the intrinsic variation in the dependence of industries on the government, we find that public sector inefficiency significantly reduces the labor productivity of private sector firms. The results suggest that raising public sector efficiency could yield large economic benefits: if the efficiency in all provinces reached the frontier, output per employee for the average firm would increase by 9 percent.

Public Service Efficiency
Public Service Efficiency

Author: Rhys Andrews

Publisher: Routledge Critical Studies in Public Management

Published: 2016-07-31

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 9781138206120

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The current economic and political climate places ever greater pressure on public organizations to deliver services in a cost-efficient way. Focused on the costs of service delivery, governments across the world have introduced a series of business like practices ¿ from performance management to public-private partnership ¿ in the belief that these will increase the efficiency of their public services. However, both the debate about public service efficiency and the policies and practices introduced to advance it, have developed without a coherent account of what efficiency means in this context and how it should be realized. The predominance of a rather narrow definition of the term ¿ very often focused on the ratio of inputs to outputs ¿ has tended to polarise opinion either for or against efficiency agenda. Yet public service efficiency, more broadly conceived, is an inescapable fact of the public manager¿s task environment; indeed in the past, the notion of efficiency was central to the emergence of the field of public administration. This book will recover public service efficiency from the relatively narrow terms of recent debates by examining theories and evidence relating to technical, allocative, distributive and dynamic efficiencies. In exploring the relationship between efficiency and democracy, this book will move current debates in public administration forward by reflecting on the trade-offs between the different dimensions of efficiency that public organizations confront.