Peter Abelson () (Department of Economics, Macquarie University)
Abstract
The paper starts with a brief introduction to the main principles of outsourcing and a description of the recent history of outsourcing in the two largest states, New South Wales and Victoria. The main part of the paper then describes seven case studies which exemplify the process and possible outcomes of outsourcing. The case studies are not randomly selected. Indeed reported results of outsourcing are likely to be biased towards success stories because governments usually suppress poor results. Consistent with other studies, in five of the reported case studies, outsourcing cut costs or raised the quality of services, or both. These examples indicate that there are significant potential gains from outsourcing. However, the potential gains are not always achieved. To achieve these gains, contracting out often requires significant structural reform of an organization and always requires detailed planning and ongoing agency commitment. As the other two case studies show, with poor management contracting-out can produce expensive outcomes or major service failures.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Macquarie University, Department of Economics in its series Research Papers with number
0503.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: