José M. Alonso

Did New Public Management (NPM) actually lead to a smaller public sector? 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 article attempts to do this, focusing in particular on outsourcing and decentralization.

Selling off formerly state-owned telecommunications incumbents played a major role in governments’ privatization programmes from the 1980s. One major consequence was that, from the late 1990s, a number of incumbents emerged as the world’s largest Multinational Corporations (MNCs). Despite the importance of this transformation, the determinants of telecommunications internationalization have not been fully analysed.