Firms and Public Service Provision in Russia

Adopting SOA in Public Service Provision

Ensuring accessibility of utility and social services is one of the public obligations of governments. Today, nations make use of the notion of e-government to expose such services to citizens. In line with this, many public organizations in Ethiopia are automating their workflows, and the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) is attempting to unify certain services as par...

Electronic Democracy, Public Accountability and Public Service Information Provision

Does Privatising Public Service Provision Reduce Accountability?

This paper studies how privatising service provision (shifting control rights and contractual obligations to providers) a ects accountability. There are two main e ects. (1) Privatisation demotivates governments from investigating and responding to public demands, since providers then hold up service adaptations. (2) Privatisation demotivates the public from mobilising to pressure for service a...

Public Service Provision, User Fees, and Political Turmoil∗

Following an electoral dispute, the central highlands of the island of Madagascar were subjected to an economic blockade during the first half of 2002. After the blockade ended in June 2002, user fees for health services and school fees were progressively eliminated. This paper examines the provision of schooling and health services to rural areas of Madagascar before, during, and after the blo...

Distributing Power: Public Service Provision to the Poor in India

How do governments distribute basic public services when budget constraints necessitate their rationing? This paper examines variations in the distribution of scarce electrical power in northern India over the last two decades. Drawing on a novel set of satellite imagery of the earth at night that avoids the biases and missing data problems affecting traditional measures, I construct annual ind...