Core Administrative Functions Research Articles

Pandemic consulting. How private consultants leverage public crisis management

ABSTRACT This forum article discusses how the Covid19-pandemic as a major public crisis is transforming the relationship between governments and management consultants, contributing to the deepening presence of consulting firms in policy-making and governance. It shows how the crisis has entrenched private advice in public policymaking as governments are spending millions of dollars on transnational professional service firms like McKinsey, KPMG, Deloitte and Accenture to coordinate their pandemic responses. Drawing from comparative research of India, Australia, UK, Germany and Canada, we outline how interests have been aligned through both the state’s demand for quick advice and the readily available supply of expertise provided by firms seeking to expand their markets. In this context, we note that professional services firms have been able to leverage their scope, scale, speed and networks in deepening their role in governance, moving beyond simply advising governments to providing core administrative functions. We conclude by discussing the implications for democracy and the possibilities for contestation.

Lessons on Measuring e-Government Satisfaction

This paper summarises lessons learned in relation to an ongoing study to collect feedback on e-government systems that have been implemented to e-enable several core administrative functions in the UK as part of the I-MEET project. Previous work summarises findings from surveys of users of such systems and this paper reports on the experience of surveying providers. An extensive survey was designed and administered to explore provider perspectives on the e-government application in general, system aspects, cost, implementation, prerequisites (e.g. policy support), various dimensions of effects, and the respondent's overall opinion of the system. The survey found a complex mix of internal and external contacted service providers and commissioners, each of whom has a different set of success measures for a service, and shared services (such as common web site providers) that were not obvious but could result in correlated observations. These findings provide signposts for future researchers to potential pitfalls. Nevertheless, when complete, the integration by the I-MEET project of user and provider perspectives will give policy makers the opportunity to balance the scale, complexity and expense of electronically delivered transactions on the government side with the usability and satisfaction from the user perspective, revealing linkages between aspects of both.

Public Access to Copyright Works Submitted to Government: Copyright Agency Ltd v. New South Wales and the Implications for Information Access

Governments create and commission copyright protected material as part of their core administrative functions and they sometimes compete with the private sector as developers of commercially valuable assets. Governments also under licence copyright protected material owned and created by others. A wide range of copyright material is also submitted to State and federal governments when individuals and corporations comply with legal obligations or conduct business with government agencies. That material submitted to governments, and the information it contains, can have value that extends beyond the initial transaction. Governments can add value by compiling and processing the information and then charge the public for access. Material submitted to government is also an important source of information source of information about how governments function. When the principles of open government and transparency are discussed, the primary focus is usually upon access to information recorded in documents created within government agencies. However, it is often necessary to extend access to documents received by agencies. Copyright in that material will be privately owned and that can conflict with public access.

Comparative Economic Systems

The U.S. health care system faces well-known problems: 47 million people without health insurance, rapidly rising costs that consume 16 percent of the country's economic output, and widely uneven quality of care. Even many people with coverage are experiencing serious problems paying for the rapidly rising costs of health care and insurance.This book - a joint product of the National Academy of Public Administration and the National Academy of Social Science - undertakes a sweeping analysis of the management and administrative issues that arise in expanding health care coverage. The book identifies the core administrative functions that need to be performed in assuring access to health coverage, describes how these functions are performed at present and under proposed alternatives, draws lessons from experience in the U.S. and abroad, and assesses suggested administrative approaches designed to facilitate the improvement and expansion of health care coverage.Adequate health care is one of today's most crucial domestic policy concerns. Expanding Access to Health Care is designed to bring together in one place some of the best thinking on the subject, not as an exercise in advocacy, but rather to lay out the issues in a balanced way so that policymakers, researchers, and citizens can better understand the complex details of health care reform.