The Other Invisible Hand: Delivering Public Services through Choice and Competition

Overview

How can we ensure high-quality public services such as health care and education? Governments spend huge amounts of public money on public services such as health, education, and social care, and yet the services that are actually delivered are often low quality, inefficiently run, unresponsive to their users, and inequitable in their distribution. In this book, Julian Le Grand argues that the best solution is to offer choice to users and to encourage competition among providers. Le Grand has just completed a period as policy advisor working within the British government at the highest levels, and from this he has gained evidence to support his earlier theoretical work and has experienced the political reality of putting public policy theory into practice. He examines four ways of delivering public services: trust; targets and performance management; "voice"; and choice and competition. He argues that, although all of these have their merits, in most situations policies that rely on extending choice and competition among providers have the most potential for delivering high-quality, efficient, responsive, and equitable services. But it is important that the relevant policies be appropriately designed, and this book provides a detailed discussion of the principal features that these policies should have in the context of health care and education. It concludes with a discussion of the politics of choice.

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Author Information

Bio of Julian Le Grand

Julian Le Grand is the Richard Titmuss Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine, a Founding Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences and a Senior Associate of the Kings Fund. He has acted as an advisor and consultant to the World Bank, the European Commission, the World Health Organisation, The Cabinet Office at No.10 Downing Street, HM Treasury, the UK Departments of Health and Social Security and the National Audit Office on health policy, welfare policy and social exclusion. He is the author, co-author or editor of twelve books and over ninety articles and book chapters on public policy, including health.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Princeton University Press

Filesize

577.77 KB

Number of Pages

208

eBook ISBN

9781400828005