FIRING GOVERNMENT WORKERS

Donghyun Park

Chapter 36 in Capitalism in the 21st Century:Why Global Capitalism Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed, 2019, pp 155-158 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: Unlike the private sector, where hiring and firing workers ultimately depends on their productivity — i.e. how much they contribute to the company’s profits — public sector employment often depends on political considerations. More specifically, political leaders, whose top priority is to maximize votes rather than profits, are reluctant to fire workers because doing so creates a political backlash and costs votes. What is more, in many countries around the world, not only in poor countries but even in many rich countries, a job in the public sector is a prevalent form of political patronage, doled out as gifts in exchange for political support. Horror stories abound — dead people collecting government salaries or pensions, infants and children doing the same, so-called government workers — so-called because they do not do any work whatsoever — drawing salaries for two jobs while not even bothering to show up at either, and so forth. The amount of wasted, misused and stolen tax payers’ money is often staggering…

Keywords: Capitalism; Globalization; Inequality; Entrepreneur; Financial Industry; Government; Socialism; Market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A1 F00 F6 N2 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789813274242_0036 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789813274242_0036 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
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:wsi:wschap:9789813274242_0036

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().