IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/6271.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Public and private welfare activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 1999

Author

Listed:
  • Smithies, Rachel

Abstract

This paper analyses the shifting balance between public sector and private sector welfare provision in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. Five sectors – education, health, personal social services, housing, and income maintenance and social security – are examined over three time points, 1979/80, 1995/96, and 1999/2000. Burchardt’s (1997) typology is used to classify welfare activities according to who funds them, who provides them, and who decides on the provider and/or amount of service. It is found that shifts in the composition of welfare activity have been relatively small and gradual: around half of all welfare activity, dropping from 52 percent to 49 percent, is entirely public; around a quarter, rising from 24 percent to 29 percent, is entirely private; and the remainder involves a mixture of both sectors. Within the latter group, there was a notable increase over time in the contracting-out of public services, which rose from 6 percent to 10 percent of all welfare activity.

Suggested Citation

  • Smithies, Rachel, 2005. "Public and private welfare activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 1999," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 6271, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:6271
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/6271/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Tania Burchardt, 1997. "Boundaries between Public and Private Welfare: a typology and map of services (publ.as Private Welfare and Public Policy, Burchardt, Hills and Propper, Rowntree Foundation, Jan 1999)," CASE Papers case02, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. repec:ehl:lserod:43901 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Daniel Edmiston, 2011. "The Shifting Balance of Private and Public Welfare Activity in the United Kingdom, 1979 to 2007," CASE Papers case155, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Tania Burchardt, 2013. "Re-visiting the conceptual framework for public/private boundaries in welfare," CASE - Social Policy in a Cold Climate Research Note 002, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE.
    2. Hills, John, 2011. "The changing architecture of the UK welfare state," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 42937, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    welfare; soical spending; privatisation; contracting-out; public provision; private provision;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H53 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Government Expenditures and Welfare Programs
    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Comparison of Public and Private Enterprise and Nonprofit Institutions; Privatization; Contracting Out

    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:ehl:lserod:6271. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.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.