Summary The private sector has a large and growing role in health systems in low-income and middle-income countries. The goal of universal health coverage provides a renewed focus on taking a system ...perspective in designing policies to manage the private sector. This perspective requires choosing policies that will contribute to the performance of the system as a whole, rather than of any sector individually. Here we draw and extrapolate main messages from the papers in this Series and additional sources to inform policy and research agendas in the context of global and country level efforts to secure universal health coverage in low-income and middle-income countries. Recognising that private providers are highly heterogeneous in terms of their size, objectives, and quality, we explore the types of policy that might respond appropriately to the challenges and opportunities created by four stylised private provider types: the low-quality, underqualified sector that serves poor people in many countries; not-for-profit providers that operate on a range of scales; formally registered small-to-medium private practices; and the corporate commercial hospital sector, which is growing rapidly and about which little is known.
Research has demonstrated that management influences the performance of public organizations, but almost no research has explored how the success or failure of a public organization influences the ...decisions of those who manage it. Arguing that many decisions by public managers are analogous to risky choice, the authors use a well-validated model of relative risk aversion to understand how such choices are influenced by managers' perceptions of organizational performance. They theorize that managers will be less likely to encourage innovation or give discretion to employees when they are just reaching their goals relative to other performance conditions. Analyses of responses to the 2011 and 2013 Federal Employee Viewpoint Surveys provide considerable support for these assertions. The findings have significant implications for our understanding of the relationship between management and performance in public organizations.
Medicine shortages are a complex global challenge affecting all countries. This includes South Africa where ongoing medicine shortages are a concern among public sector hospitals as South Africa ...strives for universal access to healthcare. The objectives of this research were to highlight challenges in the current pharmaceutical procurement process for public sector hospitals. Subsequently, suggest potential ways forward based on the findings as the authorities in South Africa seek to improve the procurement process.
Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 10 pharmacy managers in public sector hospitals in the Gauteng Province, South Africa. A thematic content analysis was performed, with transcripts coded by two of the authors. Coding was discussed until consensus was reached. Categories were developed and grouped into themes.
The 'Procurement process' emerged from the data as the overarching theme, rooted in three main themes: (i) The buy-out process that was used to procure medicines from suppliers other than the contracted ones; (ii) Suppliers not performing thereby contributing to medicine shortages in the hospitals; and (iii) Challenges such as the inaccuracy of the electronic inventory management system used in the hospitals.
Effective management of contracts of suppliers by the Provincial Department of Health is crucial to ensure accessibility and availability of essential medicines to all citizens of South Africa. Ongoing monitoring and support for the future use of computerised inventory management systems is important to reduce medicine shortages, and this is being followed up.
Determinants of public sector accounting reforms De Silva Lokuwaduge, Chitra Sriyani; De Silva, Keshara
The International journal of public sector management,
04/2020, Volume:
33, Issue:
2/3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to extend the New Public Financial Management concept and the contingency model approach to an analysis of the determinants of the accrual-based International ...Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSAS) adoption process as a financial management reform in Sri Lanka, a developing country in Asia. Design/methodology/approach Based on the prior literature, this paper develops a framework to highlight the importance of accrual-based reforms in public sector accounting policies to enable better transparency and accountability. It shows the extent to which Sri Lankan public sector institutions have adopted IPSAS-based accounting standards and the limitations of adopting these standards in a developing country, using documentary analysis. Findings In developing countries, the public sector faces practical problems when adopting reforms due to limited institutional capacity, high political involvement and bureaucracy in decision making. This paper concludes that significant policy changes towards the adoption of international accounting standards have gained momentum over the last decade in Sri Lanka while the much larger economies in Asia are still studying this process. However, the prevailing political uncertainty in Sri Lanka has negatively impacted the implementation process. Originality/value Relatively little is known about the diffusion of, and the difficulties in, implementing accrual-based IPSAS in the Asian region. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap by exploring the Sri Lankan experience. This could be applied by other developing countries in Asia, including the high-growth nations, for policy adoption and accounting harmonisation.
Recent ethical scandals involving managers in government organizations have highlighted the need for more research on ethical leadership in public sector organizations. To assess the consequences of ...ethical leadership, 161 managers in a large state government agency and 415 of their direct reports were surveyed, and personnel records were obtained to measure absenteeism. Results indicate that after controlling for the effects of employee characteristics, perceptions of procedural fairness, and supportive leader behavior, ethical leadership reduced absenteeism and had a positive influence on organizational commitment and willingness to report ethical problems. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are presented.
COVID-19 and public-sector capacity Mazzucato, Mariana; Kattel, Rainer
Oxford review of economic policy,
01/2020, Volume:
36, Issue:
Supplement_1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract
The paper argues that to govern a pandemic, governments require dynamic capabilities and capacity—too often missing. These include capacity to adapt and learn; capacity to align public ...services and citizen needs; capacity to govern resilient production systems; and capacity to govern data and digital platforms.
Leadership and Meaningful Work in the Public Sector Tummers, Lars G.; Knies, Eva
PAR. Public administration review/Public administration review,
November/December 2013, Volume:
73, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
There have been many important studies on leadership in the public administration discipline; however, scholarly inquiry still lags behind related disciplines such as psychology and business ...administration. This article helps fill that gap by analyzing the role that public leaders play in making work more meaningful for their employees, which, in turn, has a positive influence on employee job outcomes. Specifically, the authors analyze the mediating role of work meaningfulness in the relationships between leader-member exchange and organizational commitment, work effort, and work-to-family enrichment. Samples from education, health care, and local government are used. Results show that leadership strongly influences work meaningfulness, which, in turn, influences job outcomes. In addition, the impact and extent of leadership and work meaningfulness are higher in health care and education than in local government. The results emphasize the importance of leadership and meaningful work in the public sector.
•Blockchain technology has security, governance, and regulatory implications for government.•The Confidentiality-Integrity-Accessibility (CIA) provides useful insight for managers.•A major advantage ...of blockchain technology is non-reputability.
This conceptual paper explores the impact of blockchain technology on public sector processes through the lens of information security. It includes an overview of the evolution of e-government, a synopsis of existing applications of blockchain technology, and innovative blockchain developments. We utilize the Confidentiality-Integrity-Accessibility (CIA) triad to guide our discussion of the security, governance, and regulatory implications of this technology. Leveraging the CIA triad model, we provide context for public managers who may consider blockchain technologies, and we highlight certain advantages arising from the “non-reputability” of distributed ledgers.
In particular, we highlight the advantages of blockchain technologies with regards to non-reputability to help public managers understand how to best leverage blockchain technology to transform operations.
This article presents a conceptual perspective on the distinctive characteristics of public organizations and their personnel. This perspective leads to hypotheses that public organizations deliver ...distinctive goods and services that influence the motives and rewards for their employees. These hypotheses are tested with evidence from the International Social Survey Programme in order to compare public and private employees in 30 nations. Public employees in 28 of the 30 nations expressed higher levels of public-service-oriented motives. In all of the countries, public employees were more likely to say they receive rewards in the form of perceived social impact. In most of the countries, public employees placed less importance on high income as a reward and expressed higher levels of organizational commitment.
How does a large unconditional increase in salary affect the performance of incumbent employees in the public sector? We present experimental evidence on this question in the context of a policy ...change in Indonesia that led to a permanent doubling of teacher base salaries. Using a large-scale randomized experiment across a representative sample of Indonesian schools that accelerated this pay increase for teachers in treated schools, we find that the large pay increase significantly improved teachers’ satisfaction with their income, reduced the incidence of teachers holding outside jobs, and reduced self-reported financial stress. Nevertheless, after two and three years, the increase in pay led to no improvement in student learning outcomes. The effects are precisely estimated, and we can rule out even modest positive impacts on test scores. Our results suggest that unconditional pay increases are unlikely to be an effective policy option for improving the effort and productivity of incumbent employees in public-sector settings.
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