Productivity in Public Services

This paper discusses issues arising in the measurement of productivity in public services. Compared to measuring productivity in the private sector difficulties arise because the output of public services is often un-priced and because some public services are consumed collectively. A key problem is measuring the full range of outputs and quality improvements delivered by public sector organisations that are valued by society. Without comprehensive measures of output productivity statistics may be misleading. I outline methods used in the measurement of both private and public sector productivity and discuss the measurement of public sector productivity in practice. Finally I discuss studies that examine factors underlying productivity differences and productivity growth in public and private sector organisations. Public sector reforms and the use of pilot schemes in public sector organisations present opportunities for research to identify causal effects on productivity.Productivity; Public enterprises

Medical Virtual Public Services

The healthcare enterprises are very disconnected. This paper intends to propose a solution that will provide citizens, businesses and medical enterprises with improved access to medical virtual public services. Referred medical services are based on existing national medical Web services and which support medically required services provided by physicians and supplementary health care practitioners, laboratory services and diagnostic procedures, clinics and hospitals’ services. Requirements and specific rules of these medical services are considered, and personalization of user preferences will to be supported. The architecture is based on adaptable process management technologies, allowing for virtual services which are dynamically combined from existing national medical services. In this way, a comprehensive workflow process is set up, allowing for service-level agreements, an audit trail and explanation of the process to the end user. The process engine operates on top of a virtual repository, providing a high-level semantic view of information retrieved from heterogeneous information sources, such as national sources of medical services. The system relies on a security framework to ensure all high-level security requirements are met. System’s architecture is business oriented: it focuses on Service Oriented Architecture - SOA concepts, asynchronously combining Web services, Business Process Management – BPM rules and BPEL standards.Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture, Application Integration, Web services, information technologies, virtual repository, database.

Publics, politics and power: Remaking the public in public services

Challenges the notion that publicness and the public sphere is in decline, and analyses the emergence of new forms, sites and practices of publicness and the implications for public services. Covers: - shifting formations of nation and the challenges of migration, diversity and faith to universalistic notions of the public - how the emphasis on of civil society and community are recasting the public domain - the emergence of hybrid organsiational forms and public private authority - new strategies for governing publics and public service

A targeted public: public services in fifteenth-century Ghent and Bruges

Though the phrase 'public services' is a nineteenth-century invention, which was supported by a developed rhetoric of political economy, this article shows that the concept, practice and supply of such services could also be found in the medieval city. It specifically analyses three areas of urban service provision: jurisprudence and legal security, infrastructure and finally health care and poor relief. Although the available sources tend to stress the involvement of municipal authorities in providing public services, it turns out that in fact the furnishing of services was highly multi-layered. In all three areas studied, a wide range of public and private institutions offered services to specific groups within late medieval urban society. In contrast to what the notion of 'public services' lets us presume, however, public services in the medieval city were not available to all inhabitants. Instead, the provision of services was usually quite restrictive, and targeted particular groups in society

Migration and Local Public Services

Using unique Swedish micro data we examine the impact of local public services on community choice. The choice of community is modeled as a choice between a discrete set of alternatives. The US literature has produced conflicting evidence with respect to the importance of local public services. We find a robust positive (negative) relationship between local public services (local income tax rates) and the residential choices of short-distance migrants (defined as those moving within a local labor market). However, local public characteristics are less important for migrants who entered from other local labor markets. Using information on subsequent mobility, we also investigate whether the last result is due to lack of information about the characteristics of the local public sector. The evidence suggests that this is not the case.Migration; Local public services; Tiebout; Discrete choice; repeat migration

Sustainable Social Spending in a Greying Economy with Stagnant Public Services: Baumol’s Cost Disease Revisited

Baumol’s cost disease states that relatively high productivity growth in manufacturing induces a steady increase in the relative price of human services. If demand for these services is inelastic or manufactured goods are necessities, the budget share of these services inexorably rises over time and labour gradually shifts from manufacturing to services. If the care for children and elderly releases time for households, labour supply and the budget share of human services expand over time. This paper addresses the sustainability of human services such as care and education in a greying economy if they are financed by labour taxes. A productivity growth differential in favour of the market sector pushes up the tax rate and public sector employment if private goods and public services are poor substitutes, labour supply is relatively inelastic and there are not too many pensioners and children. Private affluence and public squalor result if labour supply is very elastic, the dependency ratio is large and the market provides good substitutes for public services. Greying of the population boosts demand for public employment if the market provides poor substitutes for public services, but the provision of public services per dependent may fall due to the erosion of the tax base. Subsequently, we discuss the situation where market and public employment are imperfect substitutes for households, the utility of money is not constant and public sector productivity depends on public sector pay.Baumol’s cost disease, Wagner’s law, time price, congestion of public services, public squalor, private affluence, tax burden, cost of public funds, differential productivity growth, greying of population, public sector pay

State aid and public services in Europe: the limitations of the EC package

This critique of the EC 2005 proposals on state aid and the implications for public services presents the historical and legal context, their impact on the expansion of private sector activity in the market for public services, a critical analysis of the proposals, and a discussion contrasting the route of encouraging competitive tendering with the possibility of exempting public services operating in the general interest