Towards Explaining Growth of Private and Public services in the Emerging Market Economies

The employment in public and private services in Emerging Market Economies (EME) has undergone disparate patterns of change during the transition. The paper reveals the main determinants of employment growth in different service groups in the period 1995-2008. Standard variables (per capita income, productivity gap and government expenditure) provide insufficient explanation for the increasing share of services employment while transition reforms indicators exert statistically significant influence. Estimations differ substantially for public, mixed and private services. Deviations from the theoretical framework and patterns in developed economies are observed that need to take into account path dependency of the convergence process of emerging market economies in major service groups. The findings are inconclusive and call for the extension of research towards additional explanatory factors and improvement of data set.employment growth, tertiarisation, public services, private services, transition

eStrategy and ICT Investment in Slovenia

Empirical findings show that investments in information-telecommunication technologies (ICT) contribute significantly to the economic growth at macro and micro level. At the same time, we witness a slowdown in ICT investment in Slovenia, in spite of the fact that there still exists a gap in the level of ICT use in comparison to more developed countries. The article presents main findings of different approaches to measuring the impact of ICT in Slovenian firms. A positive impact of ICT is found primarily with intensive ICT users, which should stimulate all firms to further invest in the area. Since on the contrary a slow-down in investments in ICT is occurring, we claim that Slovenian firms lack a coherent long-term eStrategy. Such behaviour may result in under-exploitation of the potential that ICT can have for productivity growth and competitiveness of companies

Public services performance: an extended framework and empirical assessment across the enlarged EU

Performance of the public sector is at the core of long-term wealth creation and welfare improvement. Yet, its measurement remains inadequate and flawed with data deficiency. The paper proposes an extended framework for the assessment of public services performance that accounts for long-term impacts on welfare and empirically evaluates it across 25 European countries on the basis of a wide set of proxy indicators. We relate the performance scores to input costs indices and propose a coherent typology of countries that correspond to the patterns of economic effectiveness of public services. The empirical analysis reveals that due to differences in input costs across the enlarged EU the economic effectiveness of public services varies to a much larger extent than the performance, with some relatively large-size governments (Sweden, Denmark, Austria) being the most effective ones

Public services performance: an extended framework and empirical assessment across the enlarged EU

Performance of the public sector is at the core of long-term wealth creation and welfare improvement. Yet, its measurement remains inadequate and flawed with data deficiency. The paper proposes an extended framework for the assessment of public services performance that accounts for long-term impacts on welfare and empirically evaluates it across 25 European countries on the basis of a wide set of proxy indicators. We relate the performance scores to input costs indices and propose a coherent typology of countries that corresponds to the patterns of economic effectiveness of public services. The empirical analysis reveals that due to differences in input costs across the enlarged EU the economic effectiveness of public services varies to a much larger extent than the performance, with some relatively large-sized governments (Sweden, Denmark, Austria) being the most effective ones