IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-34798-4_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Public Sector Reform and Employment Relations in Europe

In: Working for the State

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Gold
  • Ulke Veersma

Abstract

The structure and management of public sector activities across Europe have been subject to an onslaught of reform over recent years (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004; Proeller and Schedler, 2005). In the UK, the country where public sector reform has arguably been most far-reaching, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher began the process in the 1980s through the introduction of supply-side economic policies designed to dismantle alleged rigidities in the operation of the ‘free market’ (Minford, 1991). These policies included cutting tax rates, deregulating financial markets and — most conspicuously for this chapter — opening up the public sector to competition through privatisation, compulsory competitive tendering and the introduction of internal markets (‘marketisation’) (see Chapter 1, in this volume). The effect on public sector employment in the UK has been dramatic: numbers employed in the civil service, local government and the NHS together fell from 7.4 m in 1979 to 5.8 m in 2005, even though there was a rise in NHS employment between 1997 and 2005 (Horton, 2009) (see Chapter 3, in this volume for a fuller discussion).

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Gold & Ulke Veersma, 2011. "Public Sector Reform and Employment Relations in Europe," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Susan Corby & Graham Symon (ed.), Working for the State, chapter 2, pages 23-42, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-34798-4_2
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230347984_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Auffenberg, Jennie & Kittel, Bernhard, 2015. "Negotiating reforms in the public services: Trajectories of new public management policies in the Swedish and French police forces," TranState Working Papers 188, University of Bremen, Collaborative Research Center 597: Transformations of the State.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-34798-4_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.