Cities and Privatization Prospects for the New Century

The writing ofCities and Privatization: Prospects for the New Centurystems from a long-standing personal interest in politics, economics, public policy, and urban studies. Specifically, the book focuses on cities and privatization. Privatization was one of the most significant public-policy issues of the past century, and the policy debate has carried over into the new century. Privatization involves increasing the use of the private sector for producing and delivering a broad range of public services. The services range from collecting garbage in our cities to providing human services, such as social welfare or public health care. Privatization comes in many forms, ranging from completely getting government out of the business of producing and delivering certain services to simple contractual arrangements with private firms. Although using private firms to provide services for government has a long history in America, during the 1980s privatization quickly evolved into an intense, ideological policy debate because it threatened to alter a fifty-year pattern of government expansion. Privatization also became controversial because it involved politics and money. The critical choice involved in the debate is between market or government provision of services that were once considered to be the exclusive domain of the public sector. There are consequences for using either method to deliver services, as we shall see in this book. This book deals with the policy debate over and the use of privatization in the real world. For cities, stressed to find ways to pay for expensive public services, privatization provides the possibility of maintaining or even expanding service levels without raising taxes or having to search for alternative revenue sources. The promise of privatization rests on the fact that private firms can produce services more efficiently (for less money) than government can. Why would this create a debate that spans more than a quarter of a century? There are many reasons that will be discussed in this book, but foremost among them is that politics is interwoven into the debate and in the implementation of privatization in the real world. Politics is about power, and those in power usually do not voluntarily give away their advantages. Privatization also involves money, and in many instances it is about taking money from city coffers that was once used to fund in-house city departments and paying private contractors to perform the same tasks for less money. Turning over functions to the private sector might cause some public employees to lose their jobs, and no one usually volunteers to give up his or her job. In the real world of cities numerous services must be provided, many of which most of us take for granted. Cities must provide these services within an environment that is affected by many factors that influence their finances. And when cities run low on funds to pay for services (a condition referred to as fiscal stress) they often look toward alternative ways to provide services: Privatization, in one form or another, is one of the alternatives. Cities and Privatization: Prospects for the New Centuryis intended to be a supplemental reader for undergraduate and graduate-level urban politics, public policy, and state and local government classes, or a freestanding book for anyone who is interested in privatization at the municipal level. Although many excellent books have been published on privatization, the inspiration for writing this book came from the lack of a concise book that focused on privatization at the municipal level, blended theory with practical matters, and included real-life examples of privatization. This book blends many dimensions of privatization into a short, readable text. It contains the practical arguments and theoretical frameworks for and against using privatization, summarizes the evidence on efficiency between public and private organizations performingGreene, Jeffrey D. is the author of 'Cities and Privatization Prospects for the New Century', published 2001 under ISBN 9780130294425 and ISBN 013029442X.