it is increasingly apparent that the privatization experiment in sub-Saharan Africa has failed. This book shows that the state is set to dominate service delivery for the foreseeable future in much of the region, and that the public sector must be considered as a viable policy option for the delivery of water and electricity.

Deregulation, privatization and marketization have become the bywords for the reforms and debates surrounding the public sector. This major book is unique in its comparative analysis of the reform experience in Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Leading experts identify a number of key factors to systematically explain the similarities and differences, map common problems and together reflect on the future shape of the public sector, exploring significant themes in a lively and accessible way.

Education privatization is a global phenomenon that has crystallized in countries with very different cultural, political, and economic backgrounds. In this book, the authors examine how privatization policies are being adopted and why so many countries are engaging in this type of education reform. The authors explore the contexts, key personnel, and policy initiatives that explain the worldwide advance of the private sector in education, and identify six different paths toward education privatization—as a drastic state sector reform (e.g., Chile, the U.K.), as an incremental reform (e.g., the U.S.A.), in social-democratic welfare states, as historical public-private partnerships (e.g., Netherlands, Spain), as de facto privatization in low-income countries, and privatization via disaster. Book Features: The first comprehensive, in-depth investigation of the political economy of education privatization at a global scale.An analysis of the different strategies, discourses, and agents that have contributed to advancing (and resisting) education privatization trends. An examination of the role of private corporations, policy entrepreneurs, philanthropic organizations, think-tanks, and teacher unions. “Rich in examples, careful in its analysis, important in its conclusions and recommendations for further work, this book is a vital, rigorous, up-to-date resource for education policy researchers.” —Stephen J. Ball, University College London “Few issues are as significant as is education privatization across the globe; few treatments of this issue offer both the breadth and nuanced understanding that this book does.” —Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University

This book suggests some of the ways in which levels of development shape public sector reform and privatization in developed and developing countries, showing that conservative as well as socialist governments were committed to increasing the state's guiding role in the political economy.

This global encyclopedic work serves as a comprehensive collection of global scholarship regarding the vast fields of public administration, public policy, governance, and management. Written and edited by leading international scholars and practitioners, this exhaustive resource covers all areas of the above fields and their numerous subfields of study. In keeping with the multidisciplinary spirit of these fields and subfields, the entries make use of various theoretical, empirical, analytical, practical, and methodological bases of knowledge. Expanded and updated, the second edition includes over a thousand of new entries representing the most current research in public administration, public policy, governance, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations, and management covering such important sub-areas as: 1. organization theory, behavior, change and development; 2. administrative theory and practice; 3. Bureaucracy; 4. public budgeting and financial management; 5. public economy and public management 6. public personnel administration and labor-management relations; 7. crisis and emergency management; 8. institutional theory and public administration; 9. law and regulations; 10. ethics and accountability; 11. public governance and private governance; 12. Nonprofit management and nongovernmental organizations; 13. Social, health, and environmental policy areas; 14. pandemic and crisis management; 15. administrative and governance reforms; 16. comparative public administration and governance; 17. globalization and international issues; 18. performance management; 19. geographical areas of the world with country-focused entries like Japan, China, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Russia and Eastern Europe, North America; and 20. a lot more. Relevant to professionals, experts, scholars, general readers, researchers, policy makers and manger, and students worldwide, this work will serve as the most viable global reference source for those looking for an introduction and advance knowledge to the field.

Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.

The effectiveness and efficiency of a country's public sector is vital to the success of development activities, including those the World Bank supports. Sound financial management, an efficient civil service and administrative policy, efficient and fair collection of taxes, and transparent operations that are relatively free of corruption all contribute to good delivery of public services. The Bank has devoted an increasing share of its lending and advisory support to the reform of central governments, so it is important to understand what is working, what needs improvement, and what is missing. IEG has examined lending and other kinds of Bank support in 1999-2006 for public sector reform in four areas: public financial management, administrative and civil service, revenue administration, and anticorruption and transparency. Although a majority of countries that borrowed to support public sector reform experienced improved performance in some dimensions, there were shortcomings in important areas and in overall coordination. - The frequency of improvement was higher among IBRD borrowers than among IDA borrowers. - Performance usually improved for public financial management, tax administration, and transparency, but did not usually with respect to civil service. - Direct measures to reduce corruption-- such as anticorruption laws and commissions-- rarely succeeded.