why is the public sector so inefficient?

Answer 1

Political appointments. Civil service counters some of that.

Answer 2

Bureaucracy and power.

Within a heap of paperwork in how procedures are carried out, combined with the use of executive power you have an inefficient method for distributing decisions and factors of production.

The public sector include an unelected civil service who keep their job and hold much power without any democratic process to remove them. The government are elected (well once every 5 years when 23% get you into power - fair?) but once in power, they are pretty much free to do what they want without any checks and balances for sloppy performance.

The market forces can be bad by delivering to where the money and power of the rich live but this is much better as a distribution system because it is financially efficient although not socially efficient (uncaring is another word to use here).

When you concentrate power over such national decisions, you take people out of the equation which leads to the mess that is seen globally with corruption, dictatorships, inefficient red-tape bureaucracies, and the list goes on.

Forget concentrated power in the hands of the undemocratic government, forget the greed inherent within the market economy, why not give direct democracy back to the people?

Answer 3

guy above beat me to the punch....

No competition- its basically a monopoly. You have no choice but to use the government for the services it provides. And you must pay for the services whether you use them or not. And you have to pay whatever they decide to charge-e.g. via taxes or fees.

Fiscal responsibility and efficiency - Businesses are driven by profit motives and shareholder responsibility. The government doesn't necessarily have to do so. Most dept. need to stay w/in budget but there are no incentives to reengineer things to become more efficient. Productivity has been growing for some time now (at least 10 years). That's been through investment in automation and process improvements. Many public sector areas either don't do it or have little funds to invest in doing so. many automation projects never get finished/done/etc. One example: The FAA systems for tracking planes etc. We have been paying taxes via airline tickets that have gone into a trust fund for years. They tried to overhaul the FAA systems but have had at least a couple failures to revamp the whole system. Quite a few airports have 30 year old technology running them.

Pork, Pet projects, etc. --> Few poorly performing programs are eliminated. There are many programs still around that aren't really necessary (e.g. Wool and Mohair subsidies that were put in place in WWII).

Pay for performance? Its darn near impossible to fire a civil servant. So instead of getting rid of dead wood, inefficient people, they stay around.

Bureaucracy - all large organizations have it. Its really big in the public sector. There are millions of public sector workers between the fed and states

Answer 4

No competition and thus no incentive to improve.