Public Administration after "New Public Management"
![image of Public Administration after image of Public Administration after](https://assets.oecdcode.org/covers/100/g2ghffef.jpg)
Public administration has entered a new age. In the 1980s, “less” government was the prevailing idea; in the 1990s and early 21st century, “New Public Management” was the dominant theme. Today, public administration is moving in new directions. Reforms are focusing on the quality of services for citizens and businesses and on the efficiency of administration (the “back office” of government). The OECD is studying these new trends in a multi-annual, cross-country project called “Value for Money in Government”.
This is the first report in a new OECD series on the topic. The book examines four themes in nine OECD countries: the development of shared service centres, the steering and control of agencies, automatic productivity cuts, and spending review procedures. In addition, it contains a quantitative analysis of the size of employment in central government. The countries studied are Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The book pays particular attention to the case of the Netherlands, the country that first proposed an OECD study on value for money in government.
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Quantitative Comparison of Public Service Employment
This chapter presents the results of a quantitative analysis of the number of employees in general government using three different data sources (the OECD Public Finance and Employment Database, the ILO LABORSTA database, and the snapshots of the public administration). This chapter also addresses administrative employment – which excludes all actual service delivery both in individual services and in collective services – as a relevant concept for efficiency analysis. The extent to which countries delegate tasks to agencies differs between countries. There is also a discussion of the distribution of central government employment over the four types of government tasks: policy development, policy execution, support services, and regulatory/supervisory services.
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