IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/tin/wpaper/20100121.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Contracting out, an Empirical Study on Motives

Author

Listed:
  • Mattheus Wassenaar

    (Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, and VU University Amsterdam)

  • Tom Groot

    (VU University Amsterdam)

  • Raymond Gradus

    (VU University Amsterdam)

Abstract

Municipalities may have various motives for decisions on the mode of their task execution. Empirical studies – based on both public choice and transaction costs theory - have not yet provided a fully comprehensive explanation for municipal contracting out decisions. Therefore, we held interviews with Dutch municipal managers about the motives for the actual mode of service provision. This study provided the opportunity to investigate the relevance of motives on contracting out, to explore of additional motives and to test these statistically. As we find, municipalities do not regularly evaluate the service provision of their activities. Only in case of structural underperformance, municipalities consider a change of service provider, and then, the efficiency motive is most relevant. However, we conclude that institutional motives – as the stability of service provision - are relevant for contracting out decisions as well.

Suggested Citation

  • Mattheus Wassenaar & Tom Groot & Raymond Gradus, 2010. "Contracting out, an Empirical Study on Motives," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 10-121/3, Tinbergen Institute.
  • Handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20100121
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://papers.tinbergen.nl/10121.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Germà Bel & Mildred E. Warner, 2016. "Factors explaining inter-municipal cooperation in service delivery: a meta-regression analysis," Journal of Economic Policy Reform, Taylor and Francis Journals, vol. 19(2), pages 91-115, April.
    2. E. Dijkgraaf & R. Gradus, 2011. "Efficiency Effects of Privatising Refuse Collection: Be careful and Alternatives present," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 11-156/3, Tinbergen Institute.
    3. Reppert, Thorsten, 2023. "Local-level ownership of electricity grids: An analysis of Germany's distribution system operators (DSOs)," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    4. Tatiana-Camelia DOGARU, 2014. "Contracting Out The Pensions System In Romania," Management and Marketing Journal, University of Craiova, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, vol. 0(1), pages 91-102, May.
    5. Mattheus Wassenaar & Raymond Gradus & Toon Molleman, 2017. "Public vs Nonprofit Incarceration: The Case of The Netherlands," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 17-023/VIII, Tinbergen Institute.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Contracting out; municipalities; institutional theory; motives;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Comparison of Public and Private Enterprise and Nonprofit Institutions; Privatization; Contracting Out
    • H72 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - State and Local Budget and Expenditures
    • D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tin:wpaper:20100121. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/tinbenl.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.