The competitiveness of the public sector – lessons from a research

The operation of the public sector must be interpreted, examined and evaluated in a differentiated way. This was one of our major considerations when starting out on this research. In the research plan study prepared in early 2006 (Chikán, Attila et al, 2006) we tried to define, for the purposes of the research, what we meant by 'public sector'. The clarification of the concept was considered indispensable because we believed that the researchers representing various professional branches had to agree on the basics and we had to see which slices and segments of the public sector we would be able to examine considering our capacity restrictions.