The Rise and Demise of the New Public Management (original) (raw)

2005, post-autistic economics review

Within the public sphere, the most important reform movement of the last quarter of a century has been the New Public Management (NPM). It is of particular interest in the post-autistic economics (pae) context because NPM largely rests on the same ideology and epistemology as standard textbook economics (STE) is based (on my take on this, see Drechsler 2000), and it has had, and still has, similar results. Already more on the defensive within public administration (PA) than STE is within economics, NPM also shows that such major paradigm shifts in theory and policy may actually happen. In addition, it occasionally appears that pae-oriented scholars have overlooked the fact that some features in public management reform, state organization, and the economic interpretation of state functions that they advocatefrom "Good Governance" to "efficiency" as a goal in itself -actually belong into the "other camp" and by and large have a disastrous effect on "industrial" and "developing" countries alike, although the consequences for the latter are much more severe.