Public Management: Does it Exist? How do you do it?

One of the striking features of contemporary life in modern industrial societies is the enormous size of government and the extraordinary influence of government on the lives of the governed. For economists and other students of market forces and resource allocation problems in the “private” sector, it is becoming increasingly difficult and misleading to isolate analysis from the interactions between business and government. No matter what our particular area of interest — health, criminal justice, transportation, communication, education, “high” technologies, or defense — we find strong interactive effects between the challenges of capital formation, economic competitiveness, and industrial productivity faced by the private manager and the legal, administrative, and political forces that are the stuff of the public policy process.