This paper evaluates whether reforms associated with the New Public Management (NPM) doctrine led to a reduction in public sector expenditure and employees. Savings and downsizing the public sector were a major justification when the international movement of public sector reforms began in the 1980s. Since then, NPM has been the subject of extensive academic debate as to its successes and failures. However, empirical assessments of whether NPM reached its stated objectives are relatively scarce, mainly due to the difficulty of quantifying the impact of such reforms. This paper is an attempt to do this, especially looking at outsourcing and decentralization. We test a number of hypotheses related to the outsourcing and decentralization effects on public sector expenditure and employees through an econometric analysis using a panel data model for eighteen European Countries over the period 1980 to 2010. The results suggest a positive correlation between the degree of outsourcing in the provision of public services and government spending in the short term. On the other hand we find that decentralization tends to decrease the size of general government, particularly in the long-run.Keywords: New Public Management, outsourcing, decentralization, public sector size.

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Madrid has recently become the site of one of the most controversial cases of public healthcare reform in the European Union. Despite the fact that the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) into Madrid hospitals has been vigorous, little scholarship has been done to test whether NPM actually led to technical efficiency. This paper is one of the first attempts to do so. We deploy a bootstrapped data envelopment analysis to compare efficiency scores in traditionally managed hospitals and those operating with new management formulas. We do not find evidence that NPM hospitals are more efficient than traditionally managed ones. Moreover, our results suggest that what actually matters may be the management itself, rather than the management model.

Privatization, recognized as one of the most important economic policy reforms from the 1970s, has attracted significant attention from scholars, and the literature on the topic is now vast. Yet there is little agreement on the reasons why governments privatized. Three dominant paradigms explaining European Union (EU) privatization put forward distinct motivations. The 'British paradigm' assumed that market-friendly ideology played a significant role in a path towards a global programme inspired by the UK experience. The 'multiple logics' approach observed that the UK was an anomaly, not a leader, and that EU privatization was so diverse that there were few, if any, common logics. The 'European paradigm' emphasized the importance of Europe in the context of a changing world and placed EU privatization in the context of economic and political integration. This article tests all three paradigms using comparative data on EU privatization by country and sector. Pragmatic concerns connected to European integration requirements, particularly in sectors such as telecommunications, transport and utilities, were of the utmost importance in motivating governments to privatize from the 1990s. Europe is thus a powerful explanatory factor when considering ongoing EU privatization.

Re-municipalization is part of a broader set of reverse privatization reforms. We argue the term re-municipalization lacks conceptual clarity, confusing municipal level reversals from national ones, new service delivery from reversals, and mixed market positions from full public control. This conceptual confusion makes measurement of re-municipalization difficult. While more case studies are being discovered, quantitative time series studies do not show remunicipalization is increasing. Much case study based research argues remunicipalization is politically transformative, but quantitative research generally finds re-municipalization to be part of a pragmatic market management process, a position confirmed by the papers in this special issue. Policy Highlights• Re-municipalization is as an important trend in public service delivery. • Re-municipalization is primarily a pragmatic process of market management. • Case studies show remunicipalization can be politically transformative.Since the 1980s, the scholarship analysing the ongoing reform of public services has overwhelmingly focused on the shift of these services to the private sector, that is, on their privatization. Attention, above all, has been paidin this by now vast body of literatureto the determinants (Clifton, Comín, and Díaz-

Drawing on the literature on public service co-production, we examine the individual-level and local government-level factors associated with pro-environmental behaviours. Statistical analysis suggests that individuals that have high levels of selfefficacy, are more civically engaged or are carers, are more likely to 'co-produce' environmental outcomes. In addition, women, rural-dwellers, university graduates and middle-aged individuals exhibit more pro-environmental behaviours. Further analysis suggests that environmental co-production is more prevalent in areas with a high degree of compatibility between local public services and citizens, but worse recycling services and less overall investment in environmental services.

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