Abstract Building on agency-theoretical perspectives of public bureaucracies, we argue that politician–bureaucrat preference alignment can have important implications for bureaucrats’ pay. We study such private gains to bureaucrats from their political with elected politicians using detailed data all 1,632 top administrators active in Norwegian municipalities over a period 25 years (1991–2015)....

Over the past two decades the educational policies of neo-liberal nation states have exhibited contradictory tendencies, promoting both bureaucratic standardization of curriculum and standardized evaluation on the one hand, and postmodern diversification on the other. Despite recent increases in bureaucratic standardization, I argue that the economic, social and cultural effects of globalizatio...

Bureaucratic institutions not only provide mechanisms to coordinate work activities in the public sector, but also serve to enforce the democratic values of equality and impartiality. This paper explores how recent approaches to e-government neglect these important dimensions of bureaucracy and proposes an alternative approach to e-government. This paper sets the wider new public management ref...

How to combat corruption while maintaining absolute power is a central dilemma facing rulers of authoritarian countries. External monitoring institutions such as independent judiciary and enforcement agencies are incompatible with the structure of authoritarian regimes, whose anti-corruption strategies are often limited to methods of oversight and control within bureaucratic organizations. This...

there has been relatively little empirical analysis of the role played by cultural-social-economic policies to promote entrepreneurship. governments, for instance, conduct different entrepreneurship promotion policies. financial assistance and easing of bureaucratic rules are provided to improve the entrepreneurship process in a country. entrepreneurs benefit from education and skills, which ar...

!HE Bacteriophage Inquiry was the name given to a project, cooperatively organized by the government of British India, The Indian Research Fund Association, several hospitals in India, and several medical research institutes in India. The purpose of the project was to evaluate bacteriophage as treatment, and, to some extent, as prophylaxis, for cholera. The story of this project illuminates sev...

Macro-level estimates of the productivity of public capital are typically larger than microlevel estimates. The evidence also shows large cross-country differences in the quality of public capital. A general equilibrium growth model is introduced to explain both facts. The productivity of firms specializing in differentiated intermediate inputs depends on public capital whose provision is subje...

Rarely in public policy is there a consensus on the nature of a social problem. Yet, there is general agreement among policymakers, researchers, clients, and carers that services needed by persons with complex and multiple needs are haphazardly organised and mired in bureaucratic intransigence (Kahn & Kamerman, 1992; Mechanic, 1995; Webb, 1991). The problem, dating back to the 1960s in both the...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper analyses how the quality of governance, the size of public spending, and economic development affect the relationship between bureaucratic corruption and economic growth. The analysis shows that the interaction between corruption and governance shapes the efficiency of public spending, which in turn, determines the growth effects of corruption. Specifically, cor...