ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the accounts of public service efficiency both positive and negative in preparation for the exploration of the four faces. The economic critique of public service efficiency tells us that services owned and operated by government, while justified by reference to the inefficiencies of free markets, are themselves plagued by efficiency problems. Those efficiency problems are follows: Boyne states that while the NPMs exhortation to manage government more like a business may improve productive efficiency by changing how public services are delivered, it has ignored other equally important dimensions. The policies may have unintended distributional consequences in terms of over-rewarding particular groups or else crowding out free market transactions which would otherwise occur. The problems of dynamic efficiency emerge from the different timescales and interests of elected politicians and society and the problems of allocative efficiency emerge from the nature of public goods by Hart and Cowhey.
