DOMESTIC violence is a crime. This has been the key policy statement driving government and community reforms for the past 30 years. Criminalisation responds to the critique of early feminists that the privacy of the family created a screen behind which some men brutalised women and children. Criminalisation seeks to introduce the standards and norms of non-violence in public places, and the me...

With his unique perspective on the public sector, the Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir Amyas Morse, explains some of the elements of financial management and planning that determine success in major reform programmes. He uses examples from local government, adult social care, and NHS reforms to conclude that, too often, ‘efficiency’ improvements have shaded over into unplanned grass roots s...

Austerity and fiscal crisis make the search for cost saving reforms in local government more critical. While cost savings from privatization have frequently proven ephemeral, inter-municipal cooperation has been a relatively understudied reform. We analyze the literature on cost savings under cooperation and find savings are dependent on (1) the cost structure of public services, particularly t...

In recent years, the possibilities the Internet offers have increasingly gained in importance for government agencies. First, with tasks continuously growing in complexity and with more decentralized structures, Internet-related technologies have become a necessity for the functioning of government agencies. Second, the managerial mindset created by public sector reforms such as the National Pe...

In this paper, we study the impact of institutional inertia on the implementation of market-oriented reform programs. We examine the problem of a government who can introduce efficiency-enhancing reforms to increase the rate of economic growth by inducing, via monetary compensations, low productivity workers to exit the sector. In our baseline scenario without institutional inertia, efficiency ...

Constitutional arrangements in parts of the UK have been transformed by political devolution. In the English regions the Government has pursued a more cautious approach based upon reinforcing the regional tier through administrative decentralisation. Nonetheless, such reforms represent a significant strengthening of the machinery of regional governance and open up opportunities for the recalibr...

Timo Henckel is a Fellow in international and development economics at the Crawford School of Economics and Government, The Australian National University Vanuatu’s economy paints a picture of contradictions: it has continued on the recent growth path with low inflation, government budget surpluses, and increased capital inflows. Yet successful management of the economy has not translated into ...

Shared service has proven to be a key element when it comes to increasing government efficiency by collaboration. Here, we seek to investigate into the shared services phenomenon in the context of government reforms. For this purpose, an interview and document analysis-based multiple case study has been conducted in Germany. The qualitative analysis covers three shared service implementations o...

In the early 2000s, Costa Rica implemented comprehensive reforms of its health care system, including devolving administrative power from the central government to some providers that remain part of the national system. In this article, we evaluate how this aspect of the reform affected clinic efficiency and population health by analyzing administrative data on regional providers and mortality ...