Outsourcing of Public Services in Spain: the Necessity to Rethink a New Planned, Controlled and Evaluated Public Management
Carles Ramió Matas y Oriol García Codina
Outsourcing of public services constitutes a modernization stream of New Public Management, which is presented by the neoprivate approach of NPM as a pareto-optimal strategy from in-sourcing. Thanks to the empirical findings available to the Spanish context, it will be proven a contingent relationship between outsourcing and efficiency and efficacy, since the management dimension mediates it. Therefore, the need to rethink outsourcing management from a neopublic approach will be vindicated here, in order to make outsourcing a really efficient and effective strategy without harming social objectives of public services.
The aim of this article is to analyse the concept of outsourcing and to capture those critical components that improve efficiency and quality of public services. Economic theory and management literature both present public service outsourcing as a more efficient and effective management strategy than in-sourcing. Nevertheless, the efficiency gains that theory advocates finds no correspondence on empirical studies conducted for different countries and sectors, which show no conclusive and mixed results. Regarding outsourcing of public services, Spain has not been an outlier, but there is not such important study and there are not available sources of information that permit to carry out a quantitative study, notwithstanding. This is the reason why the current study is based on three qualitative studies carried out from 1999 to 2005, which allow us to analyse the shortcomings of outsourcing management in Spain.
The analytical dimensions that have received special attention in this paper are the motivations and the field of outsourcing, public management of outsourced public services, that is, the exercise of its prerogatives for planning, designing, evaluating and controlling; and last but not least, the implications of institutional design. All these dimensions draw a sketch where it is unlikely to improve the efficacy and the efficiency of external delivery of public services proposed by economic theory and neoprivate NPM. Outsourcing practices have been oriented to overcome shortcomings in budget, technology and public personnel management areas, reactive arguments that in no case address parallel gains in efficiency and efficacy. Furthermore, public organizations renounce the investment in design, planning, evaluation and control functions. It implies a risk of lowering quality and increasing prices at the same time, and a risk of institutional efficacy losses, that is, problems of private control of public agenda and of captures too. All this demonstrates that the prevailing reactive model of outsourcing needs to be counteracted by a proactive model rethought from neopublic convictions.
Boletín Reforme N° 397
