| Economic sectors |
| Three-sector hypothesis |
|---|
| Colin Clark |
| Jean Fourastié |
| Primary sector (raw materials) |
| Secondary sector (manufacturing) |
| Tertiary sector (services) |
| Others suggested |
| Quaternary sector |
| Quinary sector |
| By ownership |
| Public sector |
| Private sector |
| Voluntary sector |
The public sector is the part of economic and administrative life that deals with the delivery of goods and services by and for the government, whether national, regional or local/municipal.
Examples of public sector activity range from delivering social security, administering urban planning and organising national defenses.
The organization of the public sector (public ownership) can take several forms, including:
- Direct administration funded through taxation; the delivering organization generally has no specific requirement to meet commercial success criteria, and production decisions are determined by government.
- Publicly owned corporations (in some contexts, especially manufacturing, "state-owned enterprises"); which differ from direct administration in that they have greater commercial freedoms and are expected to operate according to commercial criteria, and production decisions are not generally taken by government (although goals may be set for them by government).
- Partial outsourcing (of the scale many businesses do, e.g. for IT services), is considered a public sector model.
A borderline form is
- Complete outsourcing or contracting out, with a privately owned corporation delivering the entire service on behalf of government. This may be considered a mixture of private sector operations with public ownership of assets, although in some forms the private sector's control and/or risk is so great that the service may no longer be considered part of the public sector. (See Britain's Private Finance Initiative.)
In spite of their name, public companies are not part of the public sector; they are a particular kind of private sector company that can offer their shares for sale to the general public.
The decision about what are proper matters for the public sector as opposed to the private sector is probably the single most important dividing line among socialist, liberal, conservative, and libertarian political philosophy, with (broadly) socialists preferring greater state involvement, libertarians favoring minimal state involvement, and conservatives and liberals favoring state involvement in some aspects of the society but not others.
See also
References
- Lloyd G. Nigro, Decision Making in the Public Sector (1984), Marcel Dekker Inc .
- David G. Carnevale, Organizational Development in the Public Sector (2002), Westview Pr.
- Jan-Erik Lane, The Public Sector: Concepts, Models and Approaches (1995), Sage Pubns.
- A Primer on Public-Private Partnerships http://blog-pfm.imf.org/pfmblog/2008/02/a-primer-on-pub.html#more
External links
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 17 November 2008, at 15:50.
Wikipedia Authorship and Review
Wikipedia content provided here is not reviewed directly by PediaView.com. Wikipedia content is authored by an open community of volunteers and is not produced by or in any way affiliated with PediaView.com.
Wikipedia Usage Guidelines
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article on "Public sector".
The URL for this specific entry is:
All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details). Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.