Outsourcing public provision of services tends to lower labor intensity and increase its efficiency. Costs are usually lower, but quality problems can affect services like health care and residential youth care. Consumer choice has stimulated innovation in education, but the picture is ambiguous...

Outsourcing public provision of services tends to lower labor intensity and increase its efficiency. Costs are usually lower, but quality problems can affect services like health care and residential youth care. Consumer choice has stimulated innovation in education, but the picture is ambiguous...

The decision to outsource public provision of services is multifaceted and context dependent. Doing so tends to lower labor intensity and increase its efficiency. Costs are usually lower, but quality problems can affect services like health care, though consumer choice has stimulated innovation...

Outsourcing public provision of services tends to lower labor intensity and increase its efficiency. Costs are usually lower, but quality problems can affect services like health care and residential youth care. Consumer choice has stimulated innovation in education, but the picture is ambiguous...

Given the intensive and ideologically charged debate over the use of private contractors for publicly funded services, it is somewhat surprising that many social scientists have preferred to explain government outsourcing by the pursuit of economic efficiency. Starting out from different...

Given the intensive and ideologically charged debate over the use of private contractors for publicly funded services, it is somewhat surprising that many social scientists have preferred to explain government outsourcing by the pursuit of economic efficiency. Starting out from different...

Many quality dimensions are hard to contract upon and are at risk of degradation when services are procured rather than produced in-house. However, procurement may foster performance-improving innovation. We assemble a large data set on elderly care services in Sweden between 1990 and 2009,...

We set up a model of public service provision to study the factors determining whether outsourcing to for-profit and not-for-profit producers of social services will enable a local government to achieve a given service quality at lower budgetary cost. Outsourcing provides an incentive for...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are long-term partnerships between the public and private sectors that usually involve the private sector undertaking investment projects that traditionally have been executed (or at least financed) and owned by the public sector. This paper considers...