Public services and the productivity challenge

This work is devoted to an old question, but which faces a sharp renewed interest: productivity in its relationship with public services. Public services constitute a particularly difficult challenge for productivity (its definition, its evaluation, but also its strategic implementation), insofar as they add to the traditional difficulties induced by the service dimension of the output, other difficulties related to its public (or non-market) dimension. This work aims at accounting, on the one hand, for these analytical difficulties, and on the other hand, for a certain number of measurement experiments (traditional index methods, frontier techniques). It also aims at highlighting the advantage of more critical alternative frameworks, which question the relevance of the productivity concept