Public Sector Decision Research Articles

US rural economic competitiveness by the numbers: Data mining, analysis, and web-mapping

The lack of data upon which to base private- and public-sector decisions is an important challenge in rural areas of the United States and other countries. Data suppression, done to protect the confidentiality of individual firms and people, compounds the more general paucity of rural economic data in the US. This article evaluates the use of linear programming for estimating suppressed values in the important US Census data series County Business Patterns (CBP). The full CBP dataset, enhanced with the estimates for suppressed values, was then used in shift-share analysis (SSA) at several levels of spatial aggregation. Finally, a publicly available website was developed to map the results of the SSA as well as the values of fifteen variables that may affect regional competitiveness. The overall result is a methodology for mining, analyzing, and visualizing rural economic data.

Modelling to Generate Alternatives Using Simulation-Driven Optimization: An Application to Waste Management Facility Expansion Planning

Public sector decision-making typically involves complex problems that are riddled with competing performance objecttives and possess design requirements which are difficult to capture at the time that supporting decision models are constructed. Environmental policy formulation can prove additionally complicated because the various system components often contain considerable stochastic uncertainty and frequently numerous stakeholders exist that hold completely incompatible perspectives. Consequently, there are invariably unmodelled performance design issues, not apparent at the time of the problem formulation, which can greatly impact the acceptability of any proposed solutions. While a mathematically optimal solution might provide the best solution to a modelled problem, normally this will not be the best solution to the underlying real problem. Therefore, in public environmental policy formulation, it is generally preferable to be able to create several quantifiably good alternatives that provide very different approaches and perspectives to the problem. This study shows how a computationally efficient simulation-driven optimization approach that com- bines evolutionary optimization with simulation can be used to generate multiple policy alternatives that satisfy required system criteria and are maximally different in decision space. The efficacy of this modelling-to-generate-alternatives method is specifically demonstrated on a municipal solid waste management facility expansion case.

Estimation of indirect cost and evaluation of protective measures for infrastructure vulnerability: A case study on the transalpine transport corridor

Infrastructure vulnerability is a topic of rising interest in the scientific literature for both the general increase of unexpected events and the strategic importance of certain links. Protective investments are extremely costly and risks are distributed in space and time, which poses important decision problems to the public sector decision makers.In an economic prospective, the evaluation of infrastructure vulnerability is oriented on the estimation of direct and indirect costs of hazards. Although the estimation of direct costs is straightforward, the evaluation of indirect cost involves factors non-directly observable making the approximation a difficult issue. This paper provides an estimate of the indirect costs caused by a two weeks closure of the north–south Gotthard road corridor, one of the most important infrastructure links in Europe, and implements a cost–benefit analysis tool that allows the evaluation of measures ensuring a full protection along the corridor. The identification of the indirect cost relies on the generalized cost estimation, which parameters come from two stated preference experiments, the first based on actual condition whereas the second assumes a road closure. The procedure outlined in this paper proposes a methodology aimed to identify and quantify the economic vulnerability associated with a road transport infrastructure and, to evaluate the economic and social efficiency of a vulnerability reduction by the consideration of protective measures.

The Macro‐Fiscal Role of the U.K. Whole of Government Account

The U.K. Whole of Government Account (WGA) has been conceived by the Treasury as having a macro‐fiscal role. This WGA is about fiscal transparency at the aggregate level, rather than at a more disaggregated level with regard to public sector decision makers at tiers of government, each with their own chain of accountability. This paper analyses the U.K. conception of the WGA, examining its theoretical background and evolution since the 1995 decision to convert central government accounting from cash to accruals. The definition of the area of consolidation is governed by statute, the declared intention being to align as far as possible with the national accounts definitions that provide the basis for fiscal aggregates, thereby overriding IAS 27. Net liabilities per WGA is mapped in this paper to macro‐fiscal aggregates, including public sector net debt (the U.K. preferred measure), general government gross debt (the EU preferred measure) and public sector net worth (national accounts). Conceptually, the WGA measure is situated between net debt (against which only liquid assets are netted) and the long‐term cash projections developed by the Treasury. Insights are provided into the damage inflicted on U.K. public finances by a period of over‐optimism about fiscal performance and the economy's heavy exposure to the global financial crisis. Fiscal retrenchment in all countries can have a substantial illusory component, as proposals may reduce some measures of deficit and debt at the expense of the public sector balance sheet, to which the WGA draws attention. These measures may include: privatizing state assets; neglecting existing public sector assets; cutting public sector capital expenditure; substituting public–private partnerships for conventional procurement; and posting bills to the future. The U.K. WGA may also institutionalize some protection against accounting arbitrage that distorts policy choices and fiscal reporting. Well‐documented reconciliations between figures derived from national accounts and from IFRS‐based financial reporting are therefore imperative for fiscal transparency.

Consultants as legitimizers: exploring their rhetoric

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how legitimizers invest in their approach to meet the suspicion of being a one‐sided advocate.Design/methodology/approachA multiple case study of four public sector decisions, based on a comparative argumentation analysis of two consulting reports in each case, one written by a legitimizer and one by a devil's advocate. The findings of the document analysis are triangulated with author interviews.FindingsConsultants acting as legitimizers are often suspected of being political allies of a decision maker. To neutralize their reputation as hired guns, these consultants invest in being seen as impartial by making their research approaches transparent and their argumentation balanced to increase their credibility in the eyes of stakeholders, which is necessary to execute their central task: legitimizing a major decision.Research limitations/implicationsThe number of four cases could limit the possible variation within the legitimizer role. Further research could therefore explore under what conditions consultants are willing to argue more one‐sidedly as “advocates”.Practical implicationsPractitioners, such as consultants or decision makers, can apply the approach used in this research to make their method more transparent and to balance their argumentation to get commitment from stakeholders, while legitimizing a decision.Originality/valueThe paper nuances the view on the legitimizer role of consultants in previous studies, by exploring how their arguments are more balanced and transparent than assumed and how they try to contribute to their clients' decision‐making process.

UK energy policy ambition and UK energy modelling—fit for purpose?

Aiming to lead amongst other G20 countries, the UK government has classified the twin energy policy priorities of decarbonisation and security of supply as a “centennial challenge”. This viewpoint discusses the UK's capacity for energy modelling and scenario building as a critical underpinning of iterative decision making to meet these policy ambitions. From a nadir, over the last decade UK modelling expertise has been steadily built up. However extreme challenges remain in the level and consistency of funding of core model teams — critical to ensure a full scope of energy model types and hence insights, and in developing new state-of-the-art models to address evolving uncertainties. Meeting this challenge will facilitate a broad scope of types and geographical scale of UK's analytical tools to responsively deliver the evidence base for a range of public and private sector decision makers, and ensure that the UK contributes to global efforts to advance the field of energy-economic modelling.

Efficient generation of alternative perspectives in public environmental policy formulation: applying co-evolutionary simulation–optimization to municipal solid waste management

In public policy formulation, it is generally preferable to create several quantifiably good alternatives that provide very different approaches to the particular situation. This is because public sector decision-making typically involves complex problems that are riddled with incompatible performance objectives and possess competing design requirements which are very difficult—if not impossible—to quantify and capture at the time supporting decision models are constructed. There are invariably unmodelled design issues, not apparent at the time of model construction, which can greatly impact the acceptability of the model’s solutions. Furthermore, public environmental policy formulation problems often contain considerable stochastic uncertainty and there are frequently numerous stakeholders with irreconcilable perspectives involved. Consequently, it is preferable to generate several alternatives that provide multiple, disparate perspectives to the problem. These alternatives should possess near-optimal objective measures with respect to the known modelled objective(s), but be fundamentally different from each other in terms of the system structures characterized by their decision variables. By generating a set of very different solutions, it is hoped that some of these dissimilar alternatives can provide very different perspectives that may serve to satisfy the unmodelled objectives. This study provides a co-evolutionary simulation–optimization modelling-to-generate-alternatives approach that can be used to efficiently create multiple solution alternatives that satisfy required system performance criteria in highly uncertain environments and yet are maximally different in their decision space. This new stochastic approach is very computationally efficient, since it permits the simultaneous generation of good solution alternatives in a single computational run of the SO algorithm. The efficacy and efficiency of this technique is specifically demonstrated using an earlier waste management case to enable direct comparisons to previous methods. Waste management systems provide an ideal setting for illustrating the modelling techniques used for such public environmental policy formulation, since they possess all of the prevalent incongruencies and system uncertainties inherent in complex planning processes.

Budgeting for Social Housing in Northern Ireland: A Human Rights Analysis

This research examines the funding of social housing in Northern Ireland from a human rights perspective. In doing so, it assesses selected aspects of the social housing budget against the budget-specific obligations stemming from the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). It thus serves as a useful example of how a human rights-based budget analysis framework can be applied in practice to evaluate state compliance with its human rights obligations. Emerging from an independent academic research project, this study’s findings are intended to support advocacy efforts and human rights-compliant political and public sector decision-making.

Impacts and Activities following Disaster: Narratives on Recovery in Hurricane-Affected Communities

We draw on in-depth interview data collected from participants in communities impacted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to explore how public and private sector decision makers express their understanding of the disaster recovery process. Two key themes emerged from our interviews and served as the central categories under which other issues were grouped: 1) disaster impacts; and 2) recovery activities. Disaster impacts included effects on community-level human capital, infrastructure, and the psychological/psychosocial toll wrought by the hurricanes. Community recovery activities in the wake of the storms included navigating financing/funding issues, employment growth, and more ambitious planning processes. A key finding from our analysis is the interconnectedness of the various themes discussed by participants. The implications of our findings are then discussed.

The Paradox of Public Sector Labor Law

Although the percentage of employees represented in collective bargaining in the public sector is more than five times the percentage in the private sector, collective bargaining for public employees remains very controversial The two most powerful arguments against public employee collective bargaining is that it is antidemocratic and that it impedes effective government. Concern with the antidemocratic effects of public sector collective bargaining leads courts and labor boards to narrow the scope of what must be negotiated. Concerns with collective bargaining impeding effective government leads to backlash by the legislative and executive branches against public employee unions.This article contends that the narrowness of the scope of bargaining that results from concerns over the antidemocratic nature of public employee bargaining leads to public employee bargaining impeding effective government. The law of negotiability channels channels employees and their unions away from participation in and responsibility for decisions affecting the risks of the public sector enterprise and into negotiating contract provisions that protect them from those risks. Public employee unions have performed that role very effectively, so effectively that the results can impede effective government. The article examines numerous cases where, in spite of the law, public employers have involved employees and their unions in decisions affecting the risks of the enterprise with very positive results. The article urges that jurisdictions break away from the private sector model which classifies every subject as either one on which collective bargaining is mandated or which is left to the unilateral control of management and develop alternative vehicles of employee-union voice in public sector decision-making.

Development of the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment

To describe the development of the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) and its activities. Review of literature material and other documents produced by or relating to INAHTA. INAHTA includes organizations that provide health technology assessment (HTA) advice to governments and receive most of their funding from public sources. In early 2009, there were forty-six members from twenty-seven countries, including both national and regional agencies. Interaction with other organizations includes links to Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi), the European Union Network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA), PAHO (the Pan American Health Organization, and the World Health Organization (WHO). An important feature of INAHTA is the routine interaction of its members with public sector decision makers. Output from the network has included guidelines and frameworks on HTA, reports of surveys, and joint projects. INAHTA has developed as a global point of contact and information for those with interests in HTA.

Making Better Use of Information to Drive Improvement in Local Public Services: A Report for the Audit Commission

This report on making better use of information to drive improvement in local public services was commissioned from the School of Public Policy at the University of Birmingham, by the Audit Commission. It explores how decision makers use information when making decisions. These decision makers can be politicians, top managers, operational managers, planners etc. The focus of this report is not on the use of performance indicators sensu stricto, but on the use of information more generally. Rather than studying how existing information is used or not used in decision making, this report is looking at how decision makers go about searching, analysing, summarising, processing and interpreting information when they need to make a decision. The report consists of three main chapters. - A summary of key government policy initiatives in the UK to stimulate the use of information in decision making - A review of the relevant research literature. This is the main section of the report. In it, we review the role of information in decision making theories, the organisational and structural context of information use, and psychological factors in the use of information in decision making - A presentation of a number of international perspectives on the use of information in public sector decision making

Modelling the monetary value of a QALY: a new approach based on UK data

Debate about the monetary value of a quality-adjusted life year (QALY) has existed in the health economics literature for some time. More recently, concern about such a value has arisen in UK health policy. This paper reports on an attempt to 'model' a willingness-to-pay-based value of a QALY from the existing value of preventing a statistical fatality (VPF) currently used in UK public sector decision making. Two methods of deriving the value of a QALY from the existing UK VPF are outlined: one conventional and one new. The advantages and disadvantages of each of the approaches are discussed as well as the implications of the results for policy and health economic evaluation methodology.

Vision and reality: community involvement in Irish urban regeneration

This article examines the processes and outcomes of community involvement in six Irish urban regeneration case studies, three in Dublin and three in Belfast. The findings are part of a wider study using a Complex Adaptive Systems perspective to analyse public sector decision making. Key points included: (1) the community ‘vision’ of the regeneration as an emergent property, which converged towards the vision held by the implementing agencies in the four most successful programmes; and (2) the identification of three features that contribute to non-linear (unpredictable) behaviour: a history of community involvement; the availability of resources; and the intervention of key individuals at crisis points.

The costs of urban congestion: Estimation of welfare losses arising from congestion on cross-town link roads

This paper sets out to formulate a method for estimating the costs and welfare losses of all types that congestion on cross-town link roads causes to the social fabric of the areas affected. Eight main costs are identified, most of them financial or environmental, and techniques are proposed to measure and, where relevant, price the total cost of congestion compared to smooth traffic flows. The intention is for this method to provide results that can be used by public-sector decision-makers to draw up a more efficient overall transport system.

Citizens and Resource Allocation: Improving Decision Making with Interactive Web‐Based Citizen Participation

Collective consumption and benefit characterize many government services. Moreover, government services are mostly paid for collectively through taxes—there is little or no relationship between the taxes paid by a household and its use of a particular service. Public sector decision makers face complex budget problems with difficult solutions. Involving citizens meaningfully in these decisions has long been a conundrum. The authors teamed up with the town of West Hartford, Connecticut, to develop a Web‐based survey to overcome some of these participation problems and help decision makers better understand citizen preferences. The Web survey allowed for real‐time interactivity and was tailored to present respondents with trade‐offs between service levels and taxes.

Protecting the Public Interest

Lack of cash has led virtually every state in the United States to explore innovative finance techniques that allow important improvement projects to move forward while keeping taxes and fees low. Many observers have hailed long-term concession agreements as the long-awaited silver bullet to solve the transportation funding crisis, but others have raised concerns about these deals. How are public-sector decision makers to know whether they are advancing the public interest when they consider these agreements? The concession approach has many advantages over traditional methods, but there are many concerns with these nontraditional techniques. At this point, very few people have a complete picture of the short- and long-term implications of different approaches and associated trade-offs. Some of the public concerns include facility undervaluation, use of upfront payments, length of concession, and noncompete clauses, among others. Many of the concerns with long-term concessions are legacies from the past that have been rectified as both the public and private sectors have learned and adapted. This paper summarizes public concerns related to long-term concessions, describes recent trends in how governments have evolved to respond to public reaction, and suggests key issues that need to be considered in the future.

Cash versus accrual accounting measures in Greek municipalities: proxies or not for decision-making?

Cash figures still constitute the main basis for performance assessment and resource allocation decisions in the Greek public sector even though accrual accounting information is available. The scope of this paper is to compare accrual accounting and cash accounting figures in order to assess whether such a policy could be justified on the grounds of cash eventually reflecting a fair proxy of accrual measures. Our analysis is based on 370 municipality observations over the period 2002 to 2004. The empirical findings of our study show that approximately 70% of the accrual revenues (expenses) figures can be explained on the basis of cash based revenues (expenses) as well as specific municipality socio-economic factors. Our findings shed light on the long-lasting Greek public administration shortcomings that may have contributed to the public sector financial crisis that Greece is experiencing since the end of 2009.

Economics of Rural Land-Use Change

This book analyses land use in the US. Far-reaching changes have affected rural areas over the last half century with the spread of cities and the growth in recreational and environmental uses of land. These changes have been effected mostly through the land market. The many failures of that market have led the authorities to intervene increasingly out of concern for the environment. This book meets the need for an overview of the subject by drawing on economic theories and modern econometric methods. Thirteen US economists from among the leading specialists have contributed to the 16 chapters of Economics of Rural Land-Use Change. The result is both a handbook, summarising the state of knowledge, and a presentation of (as yet unpublished) empirical studies illustrating and expanding on these issues. It is aimed at academic economists and students as well as public-sector decision-makers and managers, with the authors providing straightforward and didactic explanations of what are often complex matters without sacrificing scientific rigour and precision.

Health Care Technology Adoption and Diffusion in a Social Context

This article highlights mechanisms that may further sustainable technological development for the 21st century. The distributional effects associated with the adoption and diffusion of health care technologies are addressed wherein the capacity to capitalize on the health gains from the adoption of technology varies in society. These effects are caused by the actions of individuals as they segment themselves into distinct social groups. The circumstances under which social institutions are further segmented are explored and may motivate public sector limits on the funding for and diffusion of health care technologies. Safety and efficacy benchmarks are necessary but insufficient conditions for sustainability as product advantage on grounds of cost-effectiveness must also be demonstrated. Furthermore, given the substantial role played by public sector decision makers in purchasing health care technologies, the distributional consequences associated with the uptake and diffusion of technology need to be gauged by product designers and those responsible for marketing.