Leandro N Carrera

The London School of Economics and Political Science | LSE · LSE Public Policy Group (PPG)

Pension reform is one of the top public policy priorities in advanced industrialized countries due to population ageing and the significant weight of pension spending in governments’ budgets. As a result of these concerns European countries have engaged in varying degrees of pension reforms over the last three decades. The extant literature on pens...

Productivity is essentially the ratio of an organization’s outputs divided by its inputs. For many years it was treated as always being static in government agencies. In fact productivity in government services should be rising rapidly as a result of digital changes and new management approaches, and it has done so in some agencies. However, Dunlea...

Scholarly attention on pension reform following the recent global financial crisis has focused primarily on cases entailing the renationalization of private pension pillars. We argue that radical pension reforms should also include instances of radical retrenchment of public pension pillars. We offer an explanation of such reforms in the aftermath...

Pension policy is a highly political issue across Latin America. Since the mid-2000s, several countries have re-reformed their pension systems with a general trend toward more state involvement, yet with significant variation. This article contends that policy legacies and the institutional political setting are key to understanding such variation....

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a debate around the world on whether pension systems should be used to support individuals in economic distress. In Latin America, Chile, Bolivia and Peru have passed legislation allowing withdrawals from pension pots, yet with some significant variation. We argue that these measures cannot be simply understood bec...

The essential step involved in any organizational-level analysis of government sector productivity is to allow for the costs of different kinds of activities and services that a department or agency delivers. We use variations to ensure that the relative importance and the difficulties of producing different services can be taken account of when co...

This chapter introduces how the productivity of government agencies and public services has generally been neglected, and shows how some even recent research does not really crunch through from inputs or activities measurement to consider outputs.

Useful measures for measuring the productivity of national agencies must generate long run data (over 5 to 10 years) that is directly useful to managers within that department or agency in monitoring their progress over time. This chapter sets out how to do that at the level of individual agencies, and the methods used in Chapters 3 to 7.

Tax-raising departments and agencies fulfil a unique role in any national or federal government by generating the inflow of financial resources upon which the work of every other department and policy sector depends (Osborne, 2002). So, maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of tax-raising agencies has been a high priority for all liberal demo...

Government agencies can achieve very rapid progress and productivity growth as this chapter shows by analysing the UK Customs agency, which introduced timely IT for handling imports and exports transactions and was able to handle sharply increased trade volumes with constant staff levels as a result.

Pension reform has been high in the agenda of countries around the world as a result of demographic ageing and its subsequent impact on the financial sustainability of pension systems and public finances. Consequently, reforms have been undertaken by countries in different regions over the last twenty years. At the same time, there is evidence that...

Productivity is a key performance measure, consisting of the ratio of outputs produced to the inputs used in producing them. Since at least the 1980s, public management scholars have analysed the determinants of productivity among public sector organisations, mirroring the approach undertaken by economists in the private sector since at least the 1...

La productividad es una medida clave del rendimiento, que consiste en la ratio de los resultados obtenidos con respecto a los inputs utilizados para producirlos. Por lo menos desde la década de los años ochenta, los estudiosos de la gestión pública han analizado los determinantes de la productividad entre las organizaciones del sector público, refl...

La productividad es una medida clave del rendimiento, que consiste en la ratio de los resultados obtenidos con respecto a los inputs utilizados para producirlos. Por lo menos desde la década de los años ochenta, los estudiosos de la gestión pública han analizado los determinantes de la productividad entre las organizaciones del sector público, refl...

Looking at the Department of Work and Pensions, Patrick Dunleavy and Leandro Carrera show that overall productivity levels failed to grow at all across two decades, despite massive capital investment, increased IT spend and several business process reorganizations. The dominance of a conservative organizational culture among senior public managers,...

While Southern European countries have pursued a series of pension reforms since the early 1990s, these trajectories display important differences, ranging from path-breaking ones as in Italy in the early 1990s to more moderate ones as in Spain. Traditional welfare state approaches have convincingly pointed out the “distinctiveness” of the Southern...

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 goverment being electorally punished for pursuing a given policy) and the changes in the labor movement's organisational structure, th...

Public sector pensions have become ‘bogey of the moment’ for coalition government ministers, following warnings of steep increases in future obligations. Leandro Carrera explains the key issues lying behind the current alarms.

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 assumed to be flat as outputs were given the same price as...

Scholars interested in analyzinf how the European Union affects domestic policy making argue that Europeanization occurs when domestic changes take place in response to a gamut of factors emanating from the EU, which not only include policy paradigms developed within the EU policy process but also concepts and ideas. In short, this perspective high...

The global economic downturn has had a significant impact on southern European countries with economic growth declining by more than 3 per cent and the average unemployment rate rapidly increasing to more than 13 per cent. The crisis has raised the question of whether southern European countries will be able to remain within the Euro-zone. This pap...

The NHS is one of the largest UK industries, yet the study of health service productivity has historically been very strongly limited by an inability to measure outputs or to control for quality variations across outputs, together with a now past prejudice against directly seeking to measure government sector productivity. Even the best modern anal...

Over the past twenty years, dramatic demographic changes and negative economic trends have put significant pressure on the financial sustainability of southern European public pension systems. While governments in the region have responded through a series of reforms that reduced the generosity of pension provision, promoted supplementary pension p...

The European Union is presently facing new and crucial challenges. Doubts are publicly voiced about the viability of the euro currency and the project of a United Europe. Some governmentsare blaming others, especially those of Mediterranean countries, for failing to rein in their economic deficits, Southern European countries are being pictured as...

The analysis of government sector productivity is still in an early stage of development. We look in detail at productivity trends in the UK social security system, which accounts for almost a quarter of total state spending. We look across twenty years, 1998-2008, and in detail at a period of heavy capital investment and modernization spending fro...

Last week Lord Hutton set out proposals for public sector pension reform, which were mostly slammed by unions and the media for proposing that public servants work longer and pay more to get less from their pensions. Looking beyond the hype and the headlines, Leandro Carrera examines the key recommendations of the report and clears up the confusion...