Emanuel S. Savas - Alternatives for Delivering Public Services: Toward Improved Performance

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Alternatives for Delivering Public Services

Other Titles in This Series

Getting It Off the Shelf: A Methodology for Implementing Federal Research, Peter W. House and David W. Jones, Jr.

Inside the Bureaucracy: The View from the Assistant Secretary's Desk, edited by Thomas P. Murphy, Donald Nuechterlein, and Ronald J. Stupak

Westview Special Studies in Public Systems Management

Alternatives for Delivering Public Services: Toward Improved Performance edited by E. S. Savas

Increasing concern about the efficient and effective delivery of public services is causing citizens and city officials to examine closely the existing government apparatus for providing these services and to seek alternatives to traditional government agencies. Growing evidence supports the view that contracting for services, voucher systems, and, in general, the greater use of the private sector to deliver public services under public control may be the most desirable way to satisfy many community needs. The Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, recognizing the importance of this growing area of public concern, asked Professor Savas to bring together leaders in this field to present their latest ideas and findings. The result is this volume, which considers the nature of public goods, explores alternatives to city departments, and examines in detail the use of vouchers to give citizens a choice in selecting their service providers.

E. S. Savas is professor of public systems management in Columbia University's Graduate School of Business and is associate director of the Center for Policy Research. His wide experience in the field of public management includes five years as first deputy city administrator of the city of New York under the Lindsay administration. The Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, Inc., serves as a strong and unique link between the public and private sectors on matters of public policy and governmental operations. The institute's current major effort is to encourage increased private-sector participation and the expanded use of market dynamics and incentive techniques to help achieve public goals.

Alternatives for Delivering Public Services

Toward Improved Performance

The Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, Inc.

Edited by E. S. Savas

First published 1977 by Westview Press

Published 2018 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1977 by the Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Alternatives for delivering public services.
(Westview special studies in public systems management)
1. Municipal servicesUnited StatesAddresses, essays, lectures.
I. Savas, E. S.
HD4605.A55 352.073 77-6335

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-01811-5 (hbk)

Contents

, by E. S. Savas

, by Vincent Ostrom and Elinor Ostrom

, by Gary Bridge

, by John j. Kirlin, John C. Ries, and Sidney Sonenblum

1. ii

Guide

This book is the result of a program undertaken nine years ago by the Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, Inc., to identify and analyze potentials for private sector involvement in the delivery of public services.

Since its founding in 1968, the Diebold Institute has focused on this question in the belief that private enterprise is capable of infusing public service delivery with the efficiency in resource allocation and management that is its hallmark, whether through direct involvement as a service provider or as a source of market dynamics and management techniques.

Among the programs conducted by the Diebold Institute in this field have been:

• A seminar series that brings together senior professionals from business, government, and academia to discuss topics such as productivity and incentives in public service, performance contracting in manpower services, public corporations and productivity, performance experiments in education, contracting for health services, and privatization cases from the criminal justice and transportation systems.
• A research interchange arrangement with over one hundred research and academic institutions providing a quarterly review of ongoing research in the field of public-private sector interaction as a unique means for such organizations to stay abreast of work in that area. Publications on the state of the art of private sector involvement in public service delivery.

The monographs in the present volume were presented at Diebold Institute seminars during the fall/winter of 1976-77. The seminar series, as part of the institute's ongoing program, will continue to generate published studies in the field of private sector responses to public service needs. The next book will be titled A Comparison of Public and Private Services.

E. S. Savas

Government is big business in the United States. Together, the federal, state, and local governments collect revenues which amount to more than a third of the gross national product, and employ almost one out of five nonagricultural civilian workers. Indeed, in the last quarter century government has been one of America's most spectacular growth industries.

Governments perform two important roles: they serve as mechanisms for reaching decisions about community and societal concerns, and they provide goods and services. It is the latter activity which is most under attack, and is the focus of this book.

What are the goods and services that government should provide? If the answer, tautologically, is that "public" goods and "public" services should be provided by governments, then what are they? What is inherent in the basic nature of goods and services that render some of them "public" and some of them "private"?

In the first chapter, the Ostroms discuss and clarify these fundamental issues. They identify the innate characteristics that can be used to classify certain goods as public and others as private, and point out the need for collective action (that is, action by government) with respect to the services called public. However, as Bridge points out in the succeeding chapter, much of the growth of the federal government has resulted from decisions to provide private services at public expense. The rationale has been, implicitly more often than explicitly, that everyone benefits by having no one starve, for example; by assuring that anyone can get medical attention when it is needed; and by requiring that everyone receive at least a minimal amount of schooling.

While one could debate various aspects of such policies, particularly the relation between the intent of the policies and the results in practice, that is not the purpose of this volume, which accepts such policies as given and goes on to address the question of how best to provide and deliver the collective services, public and private, that our elected governments have chosen to supply.

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