Public sector

Economic sectors
Three-sector theory
Primary sector: raw materials Secondary sector: manufacturing Tertiary sector: services
Additional sectors
Quaternary sector: information services Quinary sector: human services
Theorists
AGB Fisher · Colin Clark · Jean Fourastié
Sectors by ownership
Business sector · Private sector · Public sector · Voluntary sector

The public sector is the part of the economy concerned with providing various governmental services. The composition of the public sector varies by country, but in most countries the public sector includes such services as the military, police, infrastructure (public roads, bridges, tunnels, water supply, sewers, electrical grids, telecommunications, etc.), public transit, public education, along with health care and those working for the government itself, such as elected officials. The public sector might provide services that a non-payer cannot be excluded from (such as street lighting), services which benefit all of society rather than just the individual who uses the service.

Businesses and organizations that are not part of the public sector are part of the private sector. The private sector is composed of the business sector, which is intended to earn a profit for the owners of the enterprise, and the voluntary sector, which includes charitable organizations.

Organization

The organization of the public sector (public ownership) can take several forms, including:

• Direct administration funded through taxation; the delivering organisation 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 as follows**

• 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 (Barlow et al., 2010). (See the United Kingdom's Private Finance Initiative.)

See also

• Civil service
• Government agency
• Nationalization
• Political Economy
• Privatization
• Public economics
• Public ownership
• Public Sector Business Cases for Projects
• Special-purpose district
• State-Owned Enterprise

References

Sources

• Barlow, J. Roehrich, J.K. and Wright, S. (2010). De facto privatisation or a renewed role for the EU? Paying for Europe’s healthcare infrastructure in a recession. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 103:51-55.
• 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