Contenu du sommaire

Which are the institutional arrangements better suited to the satisfaction of individual needs ? Whilst private and public solutions are often traditionnaly opposed, the choice of a means of action is really set on private, collective voluntary and public -or coercive- actions. Using some elementary tools of microeconomics, we present the main public choice theorists contributions to this problem, emphasizing the interest of a mixed solution (private action as a complement to a minimal public supply).

An important and general characteristic of city organizations is the existence of a dual culture, with confrontation between two main actors : elected officials and bureaucrats who must cooperate for the service of a third actor who is at the same time the client, the voter and the taxpayer. The third actor remains rather weak in the French context, while the two others are able to impose their logic on local politics, either for innovations or for resistance to change. New challenges like a fiscal crisis and a financial strain oblige cities to respond by innovations which concern chiefly the introduction of a new managerial culture. This emerging managerial culture is supported by elected officials and new young staff members ; it is opposed to a more clientelistic and protectionist culture which belongs to the traditional t staff. Therefore, innovations are producing within city halls some contradictions. In fact, data presented in the article allow us to observe that most of the innovations concern the technologies of management, and remain confined within very traditionnal policies for personal management, having not yet approached the modern forms of participatory management. The managerial culture is introduced, but halfway, and not in its more human aspects. This might be related to the duality of the municipal culture, and the superposition of various types of organizational cultures that have marked the history of municipal organizations.

The public sector in Britain varies considerably whether it is meant in the British meaning of the term which - logically - includes all that is not private (central administration, district and county authorities, public enterprise) or in the more restrictive French meaning which only covers the industrial commercial or financial activities of the state. In 1979, for instance, the public sector added up to nearly one third of total employment in the first meaning, whereas, in the second meaning, it represented but 8 pc of the working population. If it has shrunk by 3 to 4 percentage points since Mrs. Thatcher came to office, it is not so much because the objective of «less government» has generally been achieved but because of the privatisation policies enacted in the industrial and commercial sector. Since the war, the public sector has changed in scope and in nature, not always because of deliberate governmental action but because technological change has spectacularly cut employment in its strongholds (railways, coal, iron and steel). The present article tries also to describe the extent by which the public sector has retreated under Mrs. Thatcher and briefly concludes about its prospects.

The seventies undisputably mark the revival of urban public transport services, becoming a major preoccupation of central government as well as of people's representatives. In this phenomenon of political, economic and ideological rehabilitation of a transport mode doomed to disappearance a few years before, expert appraisal plays a considerable part. As an organizational innovation tool, its development took explicity place as a response to the crisis of urban transport in the sixties. Thus took place the appearance of a new professional class contrasting point by point (training, discipline references, local insertion, relation to politics,..) with central traditional expert appraisal (Corps des Ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées) and with territorial traditional expert appraisal (Engineers of Municipal Technical Services). Besides, these new experts, by their mediation functions, participate in redefining the notion of public service. But their future appears very uncertain, in consideration of their absence of institutionalization and the forces reducing both their homogeneousness and their legitimacy.

This paper studies the French literature on health care system. It shows that the difficulties of financing the health care system are cancelled by a truncated analysis. The conflict of interests is neglegted in the analysis as in the policy. Consequently, all the projects of reform of the financing system are conservative. They only concern some marginal alternation of the prevailing system.