State-owned enterprises (SOEs) play a key role in the economy of many countries. They are usually thought to be in charge of increasing social welfare. At the same time, their relatively low performance poses several problems, including slowing down economic growth. This effect is especially...

Economic growth is below what would be needed to resume rapid convergence to average OECD living standards. On-going efforts to improve the business climate are laudable, but need to be widened and strengthened. Much progress has been achieved in reducing red tape, but it is only recently that...

A number of papers have posited that there is a relationship between institutional structure and pro-social behaviour, in particular donated labour, in the delivery of public services, such as health, social care and education. However, there has been very little empirical research that attempts...

The Economic Study aims at assessing the impact of ICT within the Public Sector (PS) to Public Sector itself and to society. In particular, it provides the theoretical underpinning of the tangible elements presented in the Measurement Framework. The basic tenet of our model is that eGovernment...

We provide the first experimental test of the consequences of delegation in a mixed duopoly. Such delegation allows a profit maximizing private owner and a welfare maximizing public owner to weight sales in managerial contracts. Theory predicts that such contracts improve welfare. Our evidence...

Americans have a love-hate relationship with government. Rejecting bureaucracy — but not the goods and services the welfare state provides — Americans are insisting government be made to run like a business. But, as Constitutional Coup shows, separating the state from its public servants,...

Where general purpose governments provide a bundle of services within their boundaries, special district governments provide specific services inside the boundaries of general purpose governments. The alternative to forming a special purpose government is providing the service within a general...

In recent years, the idea that public policy can be viewed as a horizontal and polycentric process (if not a series of interlocked processes) has become widely acknowledged in the field of public administration research. Still to be explored, however, are implications of this view for policy...

A wide range of services provided by the public sector are credence goods, i.e., services for which the producer has private information whether a certain treatment is needed or not. This paper studies how ownership affects the incentives for producers to reveal such information to public...

This paper offers a comprehensive evaluation of the welfare impact of a policy usually regarded as highly successful and vastly imitated worldwide: The privatisation policy pursued in the UK by Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) The...