"In this handbook of labor economics chapter we examine the relationship between Human Resource Management (HRM) and productivity. HRM includes incentive pay (individual and group) as well as many non-pay aspects of the employment relationship such as matching (hiring and firing) and work...

This paper aims to show that public sector reforms, in the 1980s and 1990s, underemphasized the importance of human resource management, because, a) the reformers made strong emphasis on the need to reduce the size of the government apparatus; and, b) because they made war on state bureaucracy....