Outsourcing Public Services: Contractibility, Cost, and Quality

Fredrik Andersson, Henrik Jordahl and Jens Josephson

CESifo Economic Studies, 2019, vol. 65, issue 4, 349-372

Abstract: We review the literature on public sector outsourcing to explore if the theoretical predictions from the incomplete contracts literature hold up to recent empirical evidence. Guided by theory, we arrange services according to the type and magnitude of their contractibility problems. The empirical studies point at rather favourable outsourcing outcomes, in terms of costs and quality, for services without severe contracting problems. The picture is more mixed for services with tougher contracting problems, with the weight of the evidence in favour of public provision. This difference between services is largely in line with the property-rights framework and theories of incomplete contracts.

Keywords: privatization; property rights; publicly provided goods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 H11 L33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifz009 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Outsourcing Public Services: Contractibility, Cost, and Quality (2019)
Working Paper: Outsourcing Public Services: Contractibility, Cost, and Quality (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:65:y:2019:i:4:p:349-372.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

CESifo Economic Studies is currently edited by Panu Poutvaara

More articles in CESifo Economic Studies from CESifo Group Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().