Strategies for growing the productivity of public services: the good, the bad, and the useless
We are delighted to welcome Professor Patrick Dunleavy, LSE, to discuss productivity in public services on Thursday 19 June, 12:30-1:30pm.
Productivity is essentially the ratio of an organisation’s outputs divided by its inputs. For many years it was treated as always being static in government departments and public services. In fact, productivity in government services should be rising rapidly as a result of digital changes and new management approaches, and it has done so in some agencies. However there are vastly complex factors affecting productivity growth in government organisations which must be considered – especially management practices, use of IT, organisational culture, strategic mis-decisions and political and policy churn.
Professor Dunleavy will discuss how academics and analysts can best measure outputs and productivity; how policymakers should cope with problems of quality variations; why contracting out may not be a good strategy for improving public service productivity; and, how government can aim to achieve sustainable improvements in the efficiency of public services.
The slides from Professor Dunleavy’s Chalk + Talk are available to download here. A podcast of the event will follow shortly. You can also catch-up by reading our Chalk + Talk blog or via Twitter using the hashtag #smfchalktalk
Chalk + Talk is the SMF’s popular lunchtime seminar series, run in partnership with the ESRC. Chalk + Talk brings the best policy output from the world of academia into the heart of Westminster.
