Productivity is defined as the ratio of outputs to inputs. When applied to the public sector, productivity becomes a key performance indicator that shows how efficiently public resources are employed in providing public services. Until not too long ago productivity in the public sector was...

The role of innovations in improving government productivity and the effectiveness of services has previously been little studied. This report surveys central departments and agencies to ascertain what kinds of innovations they have recently made, and analyses the factors that they see as...

Government information systems are big business (costing over 1 per cent of GDP a year). They are critical to all aspects of public policy and governmental operations. Governments spend billions on them - for instance, the UK alone commits L14 billion a year to public sector IT operations. Yet...

Under automatic enrolment, employers are required to automatically enrol their employees into a qualifying pension scheme. The minimum total contribution rate is 8% of a band of earnings from £5,668 and £41,450 per annum, of which a minimum 3% must come from the employer. With over 80% of...

While Southern European countries have pursued a series of pension reforms since the early 1990s, significant variation arises across them. Focusing on the concept of political replacement risk (the probability of a government being electorally punished for pursuing a given policy) and the...

The rapid changes in electoral systems and party systems in Britain since 1997 pose fundamental problems of explanation both for electoral system analysts and for students of British politics. We first describe the main types of electoral system change introduced and show how the new systems...

The co-Director of Democratic Audit, Professor Patrick Dunleavy was asked by the leading Scottish newspaper, the Sunday Post, to write a report on the costs of transitioning to a new government in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote in Scotland’s independence referendum. The report argues that an...

Starting from Walzer's account of `complex equality', an integrated treatment is given of three fundamental decision principles - equality of supply, proportional equality and equality of deficits - which between them exhaust all applications of `equality' considerations in policy analysis. They...