رقابت و تمرکز زدایی در بوروکراسی های دولتی

Recent reforms to the provision of welfare services by the public sector have transferred control rights in production from politicians to managers and simultaneously introduced competition between public sector suppliers. We derive conditions under which a self-interested politician will introduce either competition and/or managerial control for services where quality matters. We show that both competition and managerial control give incentives for greater managerial effort. However the cost of competition is higher taxes and the cost of decentralisation is a loss of political benefits. The politician will introduce these reforms if the political benefits from higher value service outweigh these costs.

Privatisation is not the only way governments have sought to increase the efficiency of the public sector. Politicians have also attempted reform within government, particularly of state-provided welfare services such as health care, housing and education. One model is the creation of a separate agency within government whose sole task is to administrate a single, clearly defined program. A more radical option, recently pursued by several governments, is the devolution of decision making to local level coupled with the creation of competing provider organisations within the public sector. Analysis of reforms that allow competition within the state sector is of considerable interest. This type of reform has been widely adopted in the UK welfare state, where it known as ‘quasi-market’ reform (Le Grand, 1991), and it is not uncommon in the US, where it is referred to as an ‘internal market’ and is a model that has received considerable interest from other governments who both engage in the provision and funding of welfare services. Examples in UK include the quasi-market reforms in health care, education, social services, and social rented housing. Examples elsewhere are primarily reform of the provision of health care. These quasi-market reforms combine tax finance of (and in many cases, universal entitlement to) a service with competition between publicly financed suppliers.

This paper examines politician choice of organisational form for government services where the service remains government funded but the politician has the choice of delegation of control rights to managers and the introduction of competition in supply. We analyse the case of a service that has an observable but non-contractible value for the end users and for which both the producer of the service and the politician derive additional, also non-contractible, private benefits from its production. We show that the choice of organisational form will depend upon two ratios. The first is the ratio of political benefit of service provision to the political cost of raising taxes. The second is the ratio of political benefit lost under managerial control rights to managerial private benefits lost under politician control rights. Where the former is low, the politician is less likely to introduce competition. Where the latter is high, the politician is more likely to delegate control rights to a manager. Further, these factors are not independent. At the margin there is a trade-off between these two forces, which means that the politician may choose to have managerial control under competition with a higher loss from delegation than under no competition. While these factors are intuitive, our analysis also shows that delegation is not always optimal when the supplier gets more private benefit from service provision, and competition may be introduced even when managers have strong private incentives to supply high quality services.