what kind of social services does a public market provide?

[Paul ezekiel Losaria]

Doing a Environmental Impact Statement report for a public market with grand terminal

[Katherine]

There are many reasons why governments use outside organisations to supply public services. It allows
them to take advantage of innovative solutions and commercial incentives to sustain continuous
improvements, to utilise the private sector’s expertise in managing supply chains, and to manage peaks in
demand. Perhaps most importantly, this gives public sector buyers greater opportunity to focus on the
outcomes they want to achieve rather than just processes and outputs.
The importance of the public services industry supplying services to the public sector has been
recognised by the government, which has established a review chaired by DeAnne Julius to look at the
sector. It has also been recognised by the CBI, who last year commissioned Oxford Economics to look at
the scale and importance of the market for public services in the UK1. This report presents the findings
from a study commissioned by BERR to inform the PSI Review, looking at international comparisons of
the public services industry. A companion study to the present one, also commissioned by BERR from
Oxford Economics to inform the Review, is providing equivalent information for the UK and also analysing
historical trends in government spending on services.
Our approach to analysing the market for public services in the UK is based on a ‘top-down’ analysis of
public expenditure information in the UK looking at what information could be derived from relevant
departmental reports and aggregated public spending accounts on what money is being spent on and
how it is being used. (This could be regarded as information from the demand side of the UK public
services market).
The current study adopts a similar approach to that used for the top-down analysis for the UK, based on
the nearest equivalent data available for the countries studied. These are a range of OECD countries
from different parts of the world:
ï‚· United States
ï‚· France
ï‚· Spain
ï‚· Sweden
ï‚· Australia
In addition, we have looked briefly at available information for a non-OECD country, India, in order to provide an indication of what the future potential market for public services in this rapidly-growing country might be. There are inevitably some compromises that have to be made when looking for data to apply a methodology internationally that was originally designed to utilise the information available in the UK, but there is enough hard information to provide a solid basis for comparing the market for public services in different countries. We have used the latest data for each country, which therefore does not always cover the same time period in each country. When comparing different countries, however, we have presented information as a percentage of GDP, which allows for meaningful comparisons between countries of different sizes and when the information refers to different years.