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The World Bank, railways privatisation, and trade unions For the International Transport Workers' Federation, we have been looking at how the World Bank has been restructuring railways in Africa and Latin America, and the impact on workers and services. Read the report here.
The New Zealand government's Partnership Resource Centre asked us to look at the role of workplace partnerships in improving public service productivity. Read the report's executive summary here and the full report here.
Contract and agency labour: the legal framework
What is Public About Public Services? If history has shaped our understanding of public services, the boundaries of the public and private realms and the way in which services are delivered in different contexts, these are also being transformed also by current economic and political change. This finds expression especially in tension between integration and liberalisation of national economies, on the one hand, and public policy made and implemented at national and sub-national levels, on the other. (March, 2004)
Public money in private services In the late 1980s, Britain's programme of selling off state-owned industries progressed into the public utilities, through telecoms, public transport, energy supply, and water and sanitation, and as contracting out, compulsory competitive tendering and market testing were applied to local government, health care and the civil service. It became increasingly clear that privatisation of public services not only happened to be an international phenomenon, as a result of one country copying another, but that it was essentially international. This is because what has driven it most fundamentally has been the insatiable pursuit of new markets and global integration on the part of transnational corporations. Both national borders and boundaries between private and public sectors represent intolerable barriers to the transnational corporate quest for new sources of profit, new opportunities for accumulation, new markets to create and dominate. Nationally structured public ownership of key strategic sectors were the first target. (Presentation to a PSI conference on Private Money in Public Services, held in London, November 2003) From clientelism to participation: the story of 'participative budgeting' in Porto Alegre Back in 1997, when Public World first researched and reported on 'participative budgeting' in Porto Alegre, little was known outside Latin America about the experiment. Since then, Porto Alegre, host to the World Social Summit, has become synonymous with the idea that 'another world is possible'. Here you can read what we believe was the first account of Porto Alegre's participative budgeting published in Europe. It describes how the system works and contrasts the city's success in bringing water, sanitation and other public services to poor people with the much less democratic and effective and much more risky and expensive privatisation approach of cities such as Buenos Aires. (PDF format)
Growing trust in public service: why Reggio Emilia's pre-schools are world class Public service reform worldwide is usually designed in response to failures of design and delivery. Yet much more can be learned from analysing why successful services are successful. Few public services in the world are more effective than the childcare services available to the parents and children of Reggio Emilia, in Italy. Here, in a paper first published in 1997, Public World examines how it was done - and why Reggio's child care services are still innovating.
Renationalising airport security: the US experience Public Services International asked us to examine the link between deregulation of US aviation in 1978 and the failures of airport security in 2001. We found out that a disaster had been waiting to happen. Now the Bush administration, having established a federal airport security service, refused to negotiate with its workers' union.
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British rail privatisation: what went wrong? After four fatal train crashes in four years since privatisation, and with public subsidy to the privatised network much higher than when it was state-owned, and rising by the day, no-one in Britain doubts that the last major sell-off of the Thatcher-Major era has been a disaster. But the reasons for the fiasco are less well-known and tell us much about the value of workers' tacit knowledge. (PDF format)
When the Marcos dictatorship was overthrown in the Philippines in 1986, privatisation seemed like a good idea. Many democrats saw it as a way to release state assets from the corrupt control of the Marcos cronies who used them as cash cows. Sixteen years later, however, with vital public services falling under the control of local business elites and transnational corporations, privatisation had already gone several steps too far. (PDF format)
Why did California's lights go out? The Golden State has a reputation for way-out fads, but it went too far when market fundamentalists handed California's electricity supply industry over to the likes of Enron. This report, commissioned by Public Service International, shows how market deregulation led to market manipulation. Available online at Catalyst-trust
An American Tale: Modernising public services, containing privatisation When Stephen Goldsmith took office as Mayor of Indianapolis, he planned to privatise everything except the police and fire departments. Eight years later, when he left office, fewer of the city's services were contracted out than when he started. This report explains what went right. Available online at Bretton Woods ProjectOR (PDF format) New Leaf or Fig Leaf? The challenge of the New Washington Consensus The Bretton Woods Project, the London-based NGO that keeps a sharp eye on the World Bank, asked us to examine just how different were the policies of the then World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz from the market fundamentalism previously in vogue there. We concluded that, for those happy to stay in the comfort zone of seeing every policy as neo-liberal, nothing much had changed; but for those who want to keep up, Stiglitz lays down a new challenge.
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