The influence of economic theories of government failure on public management reform

In this chapter, I argue that if an archetypical NPM-type model can be identified, then it has two major intellectual foundations. On the one hand, what may be called 'generic managerialism' (Wallis and Dollery 1999) has strongly influenced the shape of NPM-style reform models. On the other hand, from the perspective of economic theory the overarching policy paradigm driving public sector reform over the past three decades derives from the theory of government failure. However, this broad intellectual tradition contains particular theoretical strands that are emphasized to different degrees in different sub-policy paradigms and this can partly help explain differences between and within these sub-policy paradigms.