NPM and the Search for Efficiency

The belief that large public bureaucracies are inherently inefficient was a critical force driving the emergence of New Public Management (NPM) in the 1980s. To reconfigure the state along more cost-efficient lines, NPM protagonists recommended that the public sector be downsized and opened up to greater private sector influence (Hood 1991). Although the high-tide of the NPM phenomenon has arguably passed, the relationship between NPM...