Scrutinizing local public service provision

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...

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...

National Interference in Local Public Good Provision

We analyze a simple model of local public good provision in a country consisting of a large number of heterogeneous regions, each comprising two districts, a city and a village. When districts remain autonomous and local public goods have positive spillover effects on the neighbouring district, there is underprovision of public goods in both the city and the village. When districts unite, under...

Electronic Democracy, Public Accountability and Public Service Information Provision

‘Public service motivation’ as an argument for government provision

A public service motivation (PSM) inclines employees to provide effort out of concern for the impact of that effort on a valued social service. Though deemed to be important in the literature on public administration, this motivation has not been formally considered by economists. When a PSM exists, this paper establishes conditions under which government bureaucracy can better obtain PSM motiv...