195, Euro 88,49 Excerpt Public services, such as health care and education, are a vital part of the economy as a whole. Low productivity in public services implies higher taxation, which in its turn reduces the allocative efficiency in the economy. However, public service providers are not subject to the discipline of the competitive market.
Public firms can operate inefficiently and survive.
Governments are experimenting with privatization and deregulation to improve efficiency and to reduce the cost of the public sector. Academic researchers have developed techniques to measure efficiency, to evaluate and to improve performance of the public sector. There are academic studies of specific public services, though there are few examples of actually transferring the recommendations of the academic research to the policy arena. Academics and policy makers are working on the same problems, but rarely work together. This book aims to narrow the gap between researchers and policymakers by presenting the most important methodologies and applications in the academic literature in a form that is accessible to policy makers.