Claudine Desrieux

Putting all one's eggs in one basket : relational contracts and the provision of local public services

Legal frameworks, especially in Europe, encourage private participation and competition in the management of public services. However, many local public authorities concentrate the various services they have in charge in the hands of a single operator, leading to horizontal integration which a priori minimizes the positive effects of competition. The following article tries to understand why vertical disintegration is regularly combined with horizontal integration. Results of our model show that under some conditions, this may lead to better performance at lower cost for the public authority. Such a proposition is tested and corroborated using an original database concerning the contractual choices made by 5000 French local public authorities in 1998 and 2001.

Owner or Holder? A Critical Study of Property Rights in Public Services

This paper deals with efficient organizational choices for the provision of public services. To better apprehend observed contracts of public-private partnerships, we depart from the property -rights literature to distinguish between ownership, rights to make residual decisions, and rights to receive residual benefits. Indeed, such rights can be temporarily transferred to a private firm, even if ownership of the assets remains public. Hence, such a separation makes it possible to analyse the large continuum of contracts from full private to full public management. Our results show that there is always a degree of private involvement that is socially efficient.