Public sector pay: Comparability,no‐strike agreements,and ‘pendular’ arbitration

Leaving aside the disputes, like the miners’ and the teachers’, that have flared into the open, there is evidence of growing resentment within the public sector at the Government's pay policy (see page 9). This paper, an edited version of a speech to the CIPFA annual conference in June this year, suggests a way forward for both public and private pay.     

Public service motivation and public sector employment preference: Comparing Italian and British students

ABSTRACT

Previous research has suggested that an individual’s public service motivation (PSM) is positively linked to a preference for public sector employment. The authors explore this link using a sample of British and Italian undergraduate students. They found a positive relationship between PSM and public sector job preferences among Italian students but not with the British students. The UK has implemented more NPM-style reforms than Italy and this could be impacting on public sector recruitment. Implications for recruitment and retention the public sector are discussed.     

Performance measurement: The state of the art

Measuring performance is a complex subject, but one which practitioners in the public sector need to get to grips with. What follows is a reader's guide to the available literature and suggestions as to how this should be approached.     

Fulfilling its promise? Strategic public procurement and the impact of equality considerations on employers’ behaviour in Scotland

ABSTRACT

Public administration is an important force influencing equality in today’s society. Like budgetary choices, public procurement has increasingly gained attention as a means to promote equality. Yet, there are important gaps in knowledge, especially regarding how equality requirements in public procurement affect company behaviour. This paper sheds first light on the impact strategic public procurement has on employers’ behaviour. Based on empirical research, this paper highlights that companies perceive a limited prevalence of equality stipulations in Scottish public procurement practices and raises doubts about the impact of public procurement practices to create a successful business case for equality.     

The Rhetoric of Modernization and the Labour Government's Pay Agenda

The modernization agenda is central to New Labour's desire to improve public services and reforming public sector pay is argued to be a fundamental requirement to delivering such improvement. This article argues that both the modernization agenda and pay reform have a rhetorical function. The authors analyse some short extracts of text from the NHS Agenda for Change on pay reform and show that much of the text requires unstated assumptions and premises to be added by the reader to render the arguments of the text to be fully coherent. Reaction to these unstated aspects of the Government's rhetoric are central to whether modernization is approved of or not.     

Nationalised industries and sponsoring departments

A market‐oriented approach to housing, if consistently applied, can lead to more efficiency, wider choice, and greater equity. But the Government's obsession with home‐ownership is leading them to ignore the function and importance of the public housing sector even within such a market‐based system.     

Public management: A third approach?

The idea that management in the public sector has everything to learn from the private sector has been dominant in the 1980s. There is, however, scope for mutual learning across the sectoral divide if the primary concern of managers ‐whether in business or government — is to be effectiveness.     

The contracting out of legal services within the public sector

From 1979, successive Conservative governments were determined to introduce private sector management approaches into the delivery of public services. This article reviews the managerial and structural changes since 1979 and proposes an initial typology through which to interpret them. The article concludes by raising issues concerning how far these changes have reflected or diluted the Government's policy objectives and how far the changes have been to the benefit of the various stakeholders involved in the provision of public services.     

Facts & figures

The National Audit Office are emerging as a force for change in management reform in the Civil Service. Their pivotal position, poised between Whitehall and Westminster, gives them a responsibility for ensuring that change is informed by the need to retain public support. The Office's validation is important and provides central government with an incentive to get things right.     

Public—Private Partnerships in Ireland: Policy and Practice

Ireland's National Development Plan 2000–2006 includes a significant programme of public—private partnerships (PPPs). The Irish Government's policy on PPPs has been shaped to ensure that capital investments under PPP are not included when calculating key fiscal aggregates. This article traces the origins of Ireland's PPP programme and outlines the extent of PPP activity to date. It details how the PPP programme has failed to make an impact in terms of addressing Ireland's infrastructure deficit and examines three particular cases where the PPP model has been applied.     

Parliament and public spending

The Select Committee on the Treasury & Civil Service has been lobbying for improvements in the Government's presentation of public expenditure information to Parliament At last, it looks as though changes will be made. But will the House of Commons — and, in particular, the select committees — be able to seize the opportunity?     

Iraq’s budgetary practices post US invasion: a critical evaluation

ABSTRACT

Although the steep decline in oil prices has inflicted havoc on Iraq’s public finances, critical analyses of the budgetary decisions and processes post-US invasion have uncovered other factors that have impeded Iraq’s economic progress. The authors evaluate Iraq’s budgets for the period 2003 through 2012 from three perspectives: legislative framework, revenue and expenditure, and monitoring. One of their primary findings is that Iraq has been operating at a surplus in excess of $85 billion. This finding contradicts officials who claim that Iraq has been operating at a large deficit. The authors explain why Iraq’s current budgetary practices of preparing, ratifying, executing and monitoring the country’s federal budget is fundamentally deficient, and much work is needed to reform its public financial management (PFM) system to bring it up to best international practices.     

Editorial: PMM,the impact of research on practice,and the emerging Research Excellence Framework

This article discusses the management of public values in local public-private networks established for highly innovative infrastructure projects. It compares six Dutch projects in terms of conflicting public values, trade-offs between public values and preferred modes of management. Some public values were initially more important, but trade-offs changed them over time. Effective management of public values requires a shared culture rather than contracts.     

Terrorism and Critical Infrastructures: Implications for Public–Private Crisis Management

The spate of terrorist attacks in New York, London and Madrid has raised some significant issues for the public management of critical infrastructures. In many countries, privatizations in the 1980s and 1990s have transferred key elements of the critical infrastructure to private companies. Because these infrastructures are of major significance to our societies and economies, they must be protected against prolonged periods of breakdown. The ‘new’ terrorism has the potential to do just that. The management of this new threat is a complex task, which invariably will be undertaken by both public and private actors. They must deal with the core challenges of the prevention of attacks, effective communication of information across organizational boundaries and the ‘ownership’ of crisis decision-making. This article considers these issues within the context of the broader research areas of public management and crisis management.     

Management in central government: The next steps

The Government's response to the latest report from the Efficiency Unit represents a compromise between those who believe that the Civil Service has gone far enough down the management road and the radicals who want even greater reform. Time will tell whether the new structures for providing public services will be better managed than the present centralised system. What is needed now is a new interpretation of the constitutional role of civil servants.     

In Defense of Pay-as-You-Go (Paygo) Financing of Social Security

Abstract

Today’s proposals to create larger social security funds and then invest them in the private sector are intended to create more rapid economic growth, which would make it easier to pay social security benefits in the long run. These proposals are also aimed at enhancing intergenerational equity by making today’s workers pay for a greater proportion of their future benefits.

The important public policy issues inherent in such proposals are numerous: questions of whether prefunded social security plans are demographically immune; whether prefunding social security can increase gross national savings and worker productivity; whether there are better ways to create a healthy economy; whether social security is best offered as a defined-benefit plan or a defined-contribution plan. This paper explores each of these important public policy issues in the context of the social security systems of Canada and the U.S.     

New development: Importance of accounts receivable in Colombian state entities and their impact on the preparation of financial information

ABSTRACT

The article shows the importance of accounts receivable in the financial structure of state entities (purely government entities and state companies), and the challenge of standardizing accounting policies in order to prepare a national consolidated balance sheet. The focus is on Colombia. The research is qualitative, based on an analytical link between the nature of state entities, liquidity management and measurement in the preparation of financial information. Evidence is provided about the opportunities and limitations of the accounting regulation frameworks established for the public sector in Colombia. The author identifies future fields of research on public sector accounting and its role in accountability.     

New development: Budgetary accounting in Colombia—arguments for a much-needed reform

ABSTRACT

Public financial management reforms are needed in Colombia to integrate the accrual-based accounting system with budgets. This would remove the need to make accounting variations through deficit measurement and would supply better information about the impact of public policies on the country’s financial situation. This article briefly explains why Colombia needs to integrate its accounting and budgeting systems.     

Strategy in the public sector

The public sector, including its non‐trading organisations, has to face complex demands and is subject to increasing competition in various forms. Nevertheless, the sector, particularly central government, finds strategy difficult. The findings of the Efficiency Unit's ‘Next Steps’ report provide an added impetus to the development of strategic thinking. The agencies proposed, as well as their sponsoring Departments, will require a strategic framework.     

Transparency in the Procurement of Public Works

The construction contract bonding system is used worldwide to protect the owner of a project against the risk of non-performance by the contractor. There is a close relationship between the construction contract bonding system and transparency in public works, which policy-makers and officials need to be more aware of. There are mainly three systems in use, which the authors have analysed in depth. Each of the three models has a different influence on transparency in public works: the ‘high penalty conditional model’ is considered the most functional model in improving transparency, the ‘low penalty unconditional model’ does not contribute very much to improving transparency, while the ‘substitute contractor model’ can lead to greater opportunities for corruption on the contractor's side.