Public sector

The public sector is a part of the state that deals with the delivery of goods and services by and for the government, whether national, regional or local/municipal.

Examples of public sector activity range from delivering social security, administering urban planning and organizing national defenses.

The organization of the public sector (public ownership) can take several forms, including:

• Direct administration funded through taxation; the delivering organization generally has no specific requirement to meet commercial success criteria, and production decisions are determined by government.
• Publicly owned corporations (in some contexts, especially manufacturing, "state-owned enterprises"); which differ from direct administration in that they have greater commercial freedoms and are expected to operate according to commercial criteria, and production decisions are not generally taken by government (although goals may be set for them by government).
• Partial outsourcing (of the scale many businesses do, e.g. for IT services), is considered a public sector model.

A borderline form is

• Complete outsourcing or contracting out, with a privately owned corporation delivering the entire service on behalf of government. This may be considered a mixture of private sector operations with public ownership of assets, although in some forms the private sector's control and/or risk is so great that the service may no longer be considered part of the public sector. (See the United Kingdom's Private Finance Initiative.)

In spite of their name, public companies are not part of the public sector; they are a particular kind of private sector company that can offer their shares for sale to the general public.

See also

Economics portal

• Civil Service
• Government agency
• Nationalization
• Privatization
• Public ownership
• State-Owned Enterprise

References

• Lloyd G. Nigro, Decision Making in the Public Sector (1984), Marcel Dekker Inc .
• David G. Carnevale, Organizational Development in the Public Sector (2002), Westview Pr.
• Jan-Erik Lane, The Public Sector: Concepts, Models and Approaches (1995), Sage Pubns.
• A Primer on Public-Private Partnerships http://blog-pfm.imf.org/pfmblog/2008/02/a-primer-on-pub.html#more

External links

• publicservice.co.uk - Public Sector News