Provision of Public Services in European Countries: From Public/Municipal to Private and Reverse?
Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: The institutional development, which the provision of social and public services has undergone since its early beginnings in the 19th century, is analysed. At the beginning, certain social services and public utilities were provided by municipalities and municipally owned enterprises, forming local welfare state. The national welfare state was the most developed in the 1960s. Since the 1980s, these services are under the impact of neo-liberal policy, the New Public Management concepts, and the European Union market liberalization policy. European Union law has developed its own legal definition of public services and labelled them as services of general economic interest. The development in five countries is analysed: United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Norway. Cross-country institutional commonalities and variance, as well as the factors that have impinged upon such country-specific trajectories are iden-
Author: Hellmut Wollmann
Institution: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Language: English
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2788591544