The new public management in international perspective: An analysis of impacts and effects

It is interesting that NPM reforms had been going on in several countries for between ten and fifteen years before the academic community began much direct assessment of whether the reformers’ claims for improvement were credible and convincing (Pollitt 1995). There was certainly some ab initio reasoning about the ‘logic’ of NPM, but not a great deal of empirical work on the consequences of NPM-inspired reforms in practice. For many academics (mea culpa) intellectualizing about categories, models, ideologies and national convergences and differences evidently took precedence over the (deceptively) simple question of: Does it work? More recently, however, a more substantial volume of academic writing has begun to explore and evaluate the seeming consequences of NPM. In this chapter I will draw on this body of work - as well as on a range of official sources - in order to assess the available evidence on the results of the public management reform.

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