Public sector
The
public sector is that 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
defences.
The organisation 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
*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.)
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 favouring state involvement in some aspects of the society but not others.
*
Public services*
Government operations
