Public sector

The public sector is the part of the economy concerned with providing various governmental services. The composition of the public sector varies by country, but in most countries the public sector includes such services as the military, police, infrastructure (public roads, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, etc.), public transit, public education, along with health care and those working for the government itself, such as elected officials. The public sector might provide services that a non-payer cannot be excluded from (such as street lighting), services which benefit all of society rather than just the individual who uses the service.^[1]

Businesses and organizations that are not part of the public sector are part of the private sector. The private sector is composed of the business sector, which is intended to earn a profit for the owners of the enterprise, and the voluntary sector, which includes charitable organizations.

Funding for voluntary sector are public services that are raised throughout an abundance of methods, theses include government fees, taxes, and different levels of government financial transfers.

Various governments funding for public services around the world, use a variety of methods to financial support these voluntary sectors.

Organization[edit]

The organization of the public sector (public ownership) can take several forms, including:

• Direct administration funded through taxation; the delivering organization generally has no specific requirement to meet commercial success criteria, and production decisions are determined by government.
• Publicly owned corporations (in some contexts, especially manufacturing, "state-owned enterprises"); which differ from direct administration in that they have greater commercial freedoms and are expected to operate according to commercial criteria, and production decisions are not generally taken by government (although goals may be set for them by government).
• Levels of Public sector are organized at three levels: Federal or National, Regional (State or Provincial), and Local (Municipal or County).
• Partial outsourcing (of the scale many businesses do, e.g. for IT services), is considered a public sector model.

A borderline form is as follows**

• Complete outsourcing or contracting out, with a privately owned corporation delivering the entire service on behalf of government. This may be considered a mixture of private sector operations with public ownership of assets, although in some forms the private sector's control and/or risk is so great that the service may no longer be considered part of the public sector (Barlow et al., 2010). (See the United Kingdom's Private Finance Initiative.)
• Public employee unions represent workers. ^[2]Since contract negotiations for these workers are dependent on the size of government budgets, this is the one segment of the labor movement that can actually contribute directly to the people with ultimate responsibility for its livelihood. While their giving pattern matches that of other unions, public sector unions also concentrate contributions on members of Congress from both parties who sit on committees that deal with federal budgets and agencies.

See also[edit]

• Civil service
• Government agency
• Nationalization
• Political Economy
• Privatization
• Public economics
• Public ownership
• Public Sector Business Cases for Projects
• Special-purpose district
• State-Owned Enterprise

References[edit]

Citations[edit]

Sources[edit]

• Barlow, J. Roehrich, J.K. and Wright, S. (2010). De facto privatisation or a renewed role for the EU? Paying for Europe’s healthcare infrastructure in a recession. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 103:51-55.
• Lloyd G. Nigro, Decision Making in the Public Sector (1984), Marcel Dekker Inc.
• David G. Carnevale, Organizational Development in the Public Sector (2002), Westview Pr.
• Jan-Erik Lane, The Public Sector: Concepts, Models and Approaches (1995), Sage Pubns.
• A Primer on Public-Private Partnerships http://blog-pfm.imf.org/pfmblog/2008/02/a-primer-on-pub.html#more
• What is the Public Sector? Definition & Examples. (2016, June & july). Retrieved June 10, 2017, from http://www.privacysense.net/terms/public-sector/