Reasserting the Public in Public Services

After two decades of dominating the public sector reform agenda, privatization is on the wane as states gradually reassert themselves in many formerly privatized sectors. The change of direction is a response to the realization that privatization is not working as intended, especially in public service sectors.
This landmark volume brings together leading social scientists, including B. Guy Peters, Anthony Cheung and Jon Pierre, to systematically discuss the emerging patterns of the reassertion of the state in the delivery of essential public services. The state under these emerging arrangements assumes overall responsibility for and control over essential public service delivery, yet allows scope for market incentives and competition when they are known to work. The recent reforms thus display a more pragmatic and nuanced understanding of how markets work in public services .
The first part of the book provides the theoretical context while the second provides sectoral studies of recent reforms in healthcare, education, transportation, electricity and water supply. It includes case studies from a range of countries: Brazil, China, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, USA, Hong Kong and the UK.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Political Science, Public Administration, Public Policy, Geography, Political Economy, Sociology, and Urban Planning.

M. Ramesh is Professor of Social Policy at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Welfare Capitalism in Southeast Asia; Social Policy in East and Southeast Asia and co-author of Studying Public Policy. Eduardo Araral and Xun Wu are faculty members at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

1. Introduction: Reasserting the Role of the State in Public Services 2. The Role of the State in Governing: Governance and Metagovernance 3. Reversing Privatization, Rebalancing Government Reform: Markets, Deliberation and Planning 4. Why Legality cannot be Contracted Out: Exploring the Limits of New Public Management 5. How Far Has Market Orientation Penetrated Public Organisations? An Empirical Test On Customer Satisfaction 6. Repositioning the State and the Public Sector Reform Agenda: The Case of Hong Kong 7. Reassertions of the State in Viet Nam's Health Sector 8. Reasserting the Role of the State in the Healthcare Sector: Lessons from Asia 9. Reasserting the Public in Public Service Delivery: The De-privatization and De-marketization of Education in China 10. Planning For Power: Lessons from Three Generations of Brazilian Electricity Reforms 11. Public Planning with Business Delivery of Urban Public Transport 12. The Fiscal and Efficiency Hypothesis of Water Utilities Privatization: A Review of the Evidence 13. Conclusion: Contradictions, Contingencies and the Terrain Ahead