The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics
Author: Jenny M. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 568
Release: 2021-10-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0192527886

The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is a comprehensive collection that considers Australia's distinctive politics— both ancient and modern— at all levels and across many themes. It examines the factors that make Australian politics unique and interesting, while firmly placing these in the context of the nation's Indigenous and imported heritage and global engagement. The book presents an account of Australian politics that recognizes and celebrates its inherent diversity by taking a thematic approach in six parts. The first theme addresses Australia's unique inheritances, examining the development of its political culture in relation to the arrival of British colonists and their conflicts with First Nations peoples, as well as the resulting geopolitics. The second theme, improvization, focuses on Australia's political institutions and how they have evolved. Place-making is then considered to assess how geography, distance, Indigenous presence, and migration shape Australian politics. Recurrent dilemmas centres on a range of complex, political problems and their influence on contemporary political practice. Politics, policy, and public administration covers how Australia has been a world leader in some respects, and a laggard in others, when dealing with important policy challenges. The final theme, studying Australian politics, introduces some key areas in the study of Australian politics and identifies the strengths and shortcomings of the discipline. The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics is an opportunity for others to consider the nation's unique politics from the perspective of leading and emerging scholars, and to gain a strong sense of its imperfections, its enduring challenges, and its strengths.

Public Service Efficiency

Public Service Efficiency
Author: Rhys Andrews
Publisher: Routledge Critical Studies in Public Management
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2016-07-31
Genre: Civil service
ISBN: 9781138206120

The current economic and political climate places ever greater pressure on public organizations to deliver services in a cost-efficient way. Focused on the costs of service delivery, governments across the world have introduced a series of business like practices ¿ from performance management to public-private partnership ¿ in the belief that these will increase the efficiency of their public services. However, both the debate about public service efficiency and the policies and practices introduced to advance it, have developed without a coherent account of what efficiency means in this context and how it should be realized. The predominance of a rather narrow definition of the term ¿ very often focused on the ratio of inputs to outputs ¿ has tended to polarise opinion either for or against efficiency agenda. Yet public service efficiency, more broadly conceived, is an inescapable fact of the public manager¿s task environment; indeed in the past, the notion of efficiency was central to the emergence of the field of public administration. This book will recover public service efficiency from the relatively narrow terms of recent debates by examining theories and evidence relating to technical, allocative, distributive and dynamic efficiencies. In exploring the relationship between efficiency and democracy, this book will move current debates in public administration forward by reflecting on the trade-offs between the different dimensions of efficiency that public organizations confront.

Public Sector Efficiency

Public Sector Efficiency
Author: Alexander Kalb
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2010-08-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 3834986976

Alexander Kalb applies advanced and novel econometric as well as linear programming techniques to investigate the sources of potential inefficiencies for local governments in Germany. He uncovers socio-economic, fiscal as well as political sources of inefficiencies. Finally, he makes recommendations how these inefficiencies in the provision of public goods and services can be reduced in the future.

Public Services Delivery

Public Services Delivery
Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2005
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780821361405

This publication sets out a framework for analysing the performance of governments in developing countries, looking at the government as a whole and at local and municipal levels, and focusing on individual sectors that form the core of essential government services, such as health, education, welfare, waste disposal, and infrastructure. It draws lessons from performance measurement systems in a range of industrial countries to identify good practice around the world in improving public sector governance, combating corruption and making services work for poor people.

Performance-Based Budgeting in the Public Sector

Performance-Based Budgeting in the Public Sector
Author: Michiel S. de Vries
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2019-01-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030020770

This book provides a comparative analysis of performance budgeting and financing implementation, and examines failures and successes across both developed and developing countries. Beginning with a review of theoretical research on performance budgeting and financing, the book synthesises the numerous studies on the subject. The book describes the situation in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Netherlands and Italy, as well as in seven developing countries - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Russia and South Africa, at the national, and at the local level. Each chapter provides historical and descriptive details of successful or failed experiments in performance budgeting and performance financing.

The Public Sector

The Public Sector
Author: Jan-Erik Lane
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2000-02-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780761967491

The Third Edition of this successful textbook introduces students to the major concepts, models, and approaches surrounding the public sector. Now fully updated to include coverage of the New Public Management (NPM), The Public Sector is the most comprehensive textbook on theories of public policy and public administration. The Public Sector is introduced within a three-part framework: public resource allocation, redistribution and regulation. Jan-Erik Lane explains the basic concepts of each of these broad areas, and goes on to examine their consequences for various approaches to the making and implementation of public policy. The book explores models of management, effectiveness and

Government at a Glance 2015

Government at a Glance 2015
Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2015-07-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9264233474

Government at a Glance provides readers with a dashboard of key public sector indicators. Each indicator is presented in a user-friendly format, with graphs, brief descriptive analysis, and methodological information.

The Politics of Public Sector Performance

The Politics of Public Sector Performance
Author: Michael Roll
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2014-01-10
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317934547

It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak. The public sector, in particular, is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical and frequently overlooked phenomenon: effective public organizations or ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in developing countries. Why do these pockets exist? How do they emerge and survive in hostile environments? And do they have the potential to trigger more comprehensive reforms and state-building? This book provides surprising answers to these questions, based on detailed case studies of exceptional public organizations and state-owned enterprises in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. The case studies are guided by a common analytical framework that is process-oriented and sensitive to the role of politics. The concluding comparative analysis develops a novel explanation for why some public organizations in the developing world beat the odds and turn into pockets of public sector performance and service delivery while most do not. This book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, development, organizations, public administration, public policy and management.

New Horizons for a Data-Driven Economy

New Horizons for a Data-Driven Economy
Author: José María Cavanillas
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3319215698

In this book readers will find technological discussions on the existing and emerging technologies across the different stages of the big data value chain. They will learn about legal aspects of big data, the social impact, and about education needs and requirements. And they will discover the business perspective and how big data technology can be exploited to deliver value within different sectors of the economy. The book is structured in four parts: Part I “The Big Data Opportunity” explores the value potential of big data with a particular focus on the European context. It also describes the legal, business and social dimensions that need to be addressed, and briefly introduces the European Commission’s BIG project. Part II “The Big Data Value Chain” details the complete big data lifecycle from a technical point of view, ranging from data acquisition, analysis, curation and storage, to data usage and exploitation. Next, Part III “Usage and Exploitation of Big Data” illustrates the value creation possibilities of big data applications in various sectors, including industry, healthcare, finance, energy, media and public services. Finally, Part IV “A Roadmap for Big Data Research” identifies and prioritizes the cross-sectorial requirements for big data research, and outlines the most urgent and challenging technological, economic, political and societal issues for big data in Europe. This compendium summarizes more than two years of work performed by a leading group of major European research centers and industries in the context of the BIG project. It brings together research findings, forecasts and estimates related to this challenging technological context that is becoming the major axis of the new digitally transformed business environment.