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This chapter addresses the various issues raised in this book. It also identifies patterns of behavior and extracts lessons, finally situating the role of IT of the public sector into the broader experiences of modern American society. Topics discussed include the public sector as a galaxy of industries, how the digital hand changed the work of government and education, IT adoption patterns, and the role of the public sector as creator of today's economy.

Sets out the results of the quantitative assessment of regulation inside government in the UK and refers to the detailed table of budget and staffing levels contained in Appendix 2. It offers a method for defining what is meant by the term ‘public sector’, which is then deployed to capture the whole set of central regulators of public sector bodies. The pattern of growth in staffing and budgets over a 20‐year period point to nearly exponential growth in regulation inside government, and through highly diverse forms of oversight institution that include auditors, inspectorates, ombudsman, and central agencies.

Despite overwhelming evidence that a large fraction of government expenditure on the provision of public goods in developing countries does not reach the intended beneficiaries, public policy debates often continue to revolve around “how much?” (i.e., how much money is spent by the government on some particular public good). Clearly, the question to ask is “how?” (i.e., how to design effective mechanisms for the delivery of public goods). This is the main theme of this essay. It discusses different kinds of public goods that are vital to the poor and the evidence of their value; the spontaneous or voluntary private provision of public goods by the beneficiaries; and the formal provision of public goods where the government or some other organization is in charge of providing the public good, with special emphasis on institution design issues.

The title of this chapter reflects an important question about the contemporary development of public administration and its role within the contemporary state. It is clear that the public sectors in most contemporary European countries have been through some process of administrative reform, and that the traditional public bureaucratic (Weberian) sector has been, to a great extent, dismantled. The character of the emergent system for governing is not always clear, but the question posed by the reforms that have taken place is whether that earlier version of government can, or should, in any way be recaptured. The implicit and explicit argument is that a good deal of value has been lost through these changes in the style of governing, but that it may well be impossible (and undesirable) to rebuild anything approximating the older version of the state and the public bureaucracy. The different sections of the chapter look at the Weberian state (and other forms of bureaucratic government), critiques of the Weberian model, the dismantling administrative reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, and the issue of putting back together the Weberian state.

Italy's economic and employment problems were to a large extent home made, whereas external economic and political pressures did facilitate internal revitalization. While export‐oriented industries in northern Italy had maintained international competitiveness, overall employment rates were very low, and inflation was very high until the early 1990s. Since the clientelistic Italian state was not able to put the brakes on the spiral of wage and price increases that were automatically linked to all sorts of public and welfare‐state expenditures, public‐sector deficits were rising inexorably. After the collapse of the old party system, however, the unions were able and willing to enter into a series of accords with successive reform governments that not only facilitated price stability through wage restraint but that also legitimated significant welfare cutbacks that contributed to budget consolidation. The impetus for reform was a serious political commitment to meet the stringent Maastricht criteria in order to ensure Italy's membership in the European Monetary Union.

An account is given of the movement towards the privatization of social welfare activity that has taken place since the mid 1980s. Various aspects of this are discussed: the different paths that have been taken; public erosion of retirement income; contracting out services from the public to the private sector; the larger trend of devolving responsibility for social welfare from central to local government units, and from local government to community‐based private agencies; the commodification of social care; and private ‘safety net’ accounts.

This chapter presents the case study of IKA, a social security organization in Greece. IKA is a public sector organization with computer services which run as inefficiently as its bureaucracy. From the early 1980s, IKA has conceived several strategies to use ICT for the modernization of the organization, but up until the end of the 1990s none of these had been implemented. To explain why IKA faced such severe difficulties in utilizing ICT, analysis of the case draws from sociological studies of the Greek public sector. These studies suggest that the modernization objectives associated with information systems innovation clashed with the covert mission of public administration in Greece as a political employer. The case study explains the annihilation of the efficiency potential of ICT by organization’s performance as a rational behaviour in terms of its hidden role.

The first section of the chapter discusses the factors that give rise to a need for administrative reform in the public sector: the size and stability of public administrations means that they change less quickly than the political, economic and social framework within which they operate; and frictions periodically emerge between their two components – the political overseers and the administration proper. The second section identifies administrative reform as a peculiarly twentieth century phenomenon in Europe. The remaining sections of the chapter go on to look at various aspects of this administrative reform: reform motivations and objectives; administrative reform in West Europe; and comparative contrasts in administrative reform.

Chapter 8 examines the role of private sector in the post-1991 period with reference to the Indian banking sector. Empirical analysis reveals that the private sector is increasing its share although public sector banks still dominate the Indian banking sector. Private sector banks including foreign banks are also showing their impact on the sector in terms of improving the efficiency of public sector banks, and reducing their operating expenses and non-performing assets. Notwithstanding numerous policy measures such as priority sector lending, Indian banks—public as well as private sector banks-are yet to expand financial access to agriculture and small enterprises.

The crisis in occupational pensions in Britain extend beyond coverage rates and benefit levels. Private-sector sponsors of existing defined-benefit plans face an uncertain future notwithstanding the establishment in 2005 of the Pension Protection Fund. As for the public sector, the unfunded status of many defined-benefit plans raises significant doubts about their long-term viability. Whatever happens to the Turner Report, the pension crisis has just begun; it is bound to dominate domestic politics for another generation. Most private sector employees do not have access to social security entitlements while public sector employees may see their entitlements passed back to central government to become yet another liability on an already overburdened state. This chapter examines the crisis in the British occupational pension system, the link between pensions and modern capitalism, corporate capitalism in a global environment, lessons for public policy, capital market efficiency and occupational pensions in the public sector.

Examines the overall pattern of different forms of control – oversight, mutuality, competition and contrived randomness – and suggests that each could be used more effectively to secure public objectives in regulation inside government. The regulators themselves appear not to apply the principles they apply in regulating to themselves. It is notable that there is little attempt to work out the costs to the public sector bodies of being regulated, and weak evidence of principles of competition and oversight, applied so assiduously to the regulatees, being applied to the regulators. The search for some consistency in approach offers a possible avenue for reform.

This chapter focuses on the lessons private industry could learn from state and local government pensions, It begins with a brief history of public pensions. It then compares public and private pensions, and discusses benefits to employees and public defined benefit plans as financial engines. It is argued that public pension plans are in a strong position to handle the coming influx of retirees, since, unlike Social Security (mainly a pay-as-you-go program); public pensions are rather well-funded (approximately 95 percent in 2003).

This chapter looks at exchange rate management and other policy options for an open economy. It begins with an introductory discussion of overall macroeconomic management for open economies, including the issues of internal and external balance and inflation targeting. It then examines how countries can attempt to manage the exchange rate. Topics covered in this section include the benefits of maintaining an undervalued exchange rate in some developing countries, government interventions to smooth out exchange rate fluctuations, and the trade-off between stability and flexibility when choosing an exchange rate regime. The chapter concludes with an analysis of other policy options in open economies, including heterodox microeconomic interventions, public sector liability management, and debt restructuring.