MSc Public Policy and Management

In this module you look at the state and how it is managed. This is a huge agenda and brings in ideas from political science, from history, sociology, economics, anthropology and management science. The purposes are these: to establish what is meant by some key concepts such as the State, Government and Policy, which are often taken for granted but about which we need to be clear – and to understand different interpretations; to survey the principles and practice of public management using a historical and comparative perspective; to introduce a range of ideas that have emerged about how to manage the public sector to demonstrate the importance of context in understanding management and changing management practices;.to raise some issues about the nature of the policy process in different contexts; to set out some of the main debates in the field in order to help you to make your own judgements.

It is an interesting time to be studying public finance. First, there are changes in the way that the public sector ‘does its business’. Bureaucracies with strict hierarchies of public employees carrying out their duties according to a fixed set of rules are giving way, or have already given way, to different ways of working. In some cases there have been programmes of decentralisation and delegation of authority so that managers and professionals at relatively junior levels now have to take decisions based on the best information, including financial information, available to them. In professions across the public sector – whether medical, educational, legal, engineering or custodial – people are making choices about investments, about how to achieve efficiency, how to stay within budget and how to improve performance. Whether reluctantly or willingly, people are having to understand costs, budgets, financial statements about cash flows and expenditures, even when they are not in accountancy.
In other cases, services are increasingly contracted out to commercial companies, to NGOs or to communities rather than being provided directly by public employees. These arrangements require a different set of disciplines – of monitoring other people’s performance, of assessing value for money of contracts rather than employees’ performance.
A second reason why public finance is interesting now is that in many countries what people are being held to account for is also changing. It is often not sufficient to have accounts that show that money has been spent as governments intended – politicians and the public want to know how well it has been spent, whether it has been used efficiently and whether it has achieved the purposes for which it was allocated. This widening of accountability, combined with the delegation of accountability lower down in the organisations, has placed a burden on accounting systems and on the managers and professionals who have to understand and operate them. Computer systems make financial management easier but managers need to understand the concepts underlying the numbers and the consequences of the financial information that is provided.

Research plays an essential role in business and in public policy and management. Increasingly, organisations undertake small-scale research projects, to find out about matters relating to the concerns of their organisation or to critically evaluate existing policies. Both commercial firms and government institutions rely upon research to inform their decisions, to test the effectiveness of existing policies, to predict the effects of intended future policies, to understand management processes and decisions and to gain insights into public preferences and opinions about public services.
Whether you are studying this module in order to carry out research in your professional role, to commission and project-manage research conducted by others or to complete a dissertation for your MSc qualification, your ability to appropriately and rigorously design, execute report, and evaluate research is essential.

In this module you look at the state and how it is managed. This is a huge agenda and brings in ideas from political science, from history, sociology, economics, anthropology and management science. The purposes are these: to establish what is meant by some key concepts such as the State, Government and Policy, which are often taken for granted but about which we need to be clear – and to understand different interpretations; to survey the principles and practice of public management using a historical and comparative perspective; to introduce a range of ideas that have emerged about how to manage the public sector to demonstrate the importance of context in understanding management and changing management practices;.to raise some issues about the nature of the policy process in different contexts; to set out some of the main debates in the field in order to help you to make your own judgements.

It is an interesting time to be studying public finance. First, there are changes in the way that the public sector ‘does its business’. Bureaucracies with strict hierarchies of public employees carrying out their duties according to a fixed set of rules are giving way, or have already given way, to different ways of working. In some cases there have been programmes of decentralisation and delegation of authority so that managers and professionals at relatively junior levels now have to take decisions based on the best information, including financial information, available to them. In professions across the public sector – whether medical, educational, legal, engineering or custodial – people are making choices about investments, about how to achieve efficiency, how to stay within budget and how to improve performance. Whether reluctantly or willingly, people are having to understand costs, budgets, financial statements about cash flows and expenditures, even when they are not in accountancy.
In other cases, services are increasingly contracted out to commercial companies, to NGOs or to communities rather than being provided directly by public employees. These arrangements require a different set of disciplines – of monitoring other people’s performance, of assessing value for money of contracts rather than employees’ performance.
A second reason why public finance is interesting now is that in many countries what people are being held to account for is also changing. It is often not sufficient to have accounts that show that money has been spent as governments intended – politicians and the public want to know how well it has been spent, whether it has been used efficiently and whether it has achieved the purposes for which it was allocated. This widening of accountability, combined with the delegation of accountability lower down in the organisations, has placed a burden on accounting systems and on the managers and professionals who have to understand and operate them. Computer systems make financial management easier but managers need to understand the concepts underlying the numbers and the consequences of the financial information that is provided.

Research plays an essential role in business and in public policy and management. Increasingly, organisations undertake small-scale research projects, to find out about matters relating to the concerns of their organisation or to critically evaluate existing policies. Both commercial firms and government institutions rely upon research to inform their decisions, to test the effectiveness of existing policies, to predict the effects of intended future policies, to understand management processes and decisions and to gain insights into public preferences and opinions about public services.
Whether you are studying this module in order to carry out research in your professional role, to commission and project-manage research conducted by others or to complete a dissertation for your MSc qualification, your ability to appropriately and rigorously design, execute report, and evaluate research is essential.

Decentralisation is a worldwide reality, as most countries are already engaged in a more or less advanced form of it. The following figures illustrate this trend: in the 1980s local governments around the world collected on average 15% of revenues and spent 20% of expenditures. By the late 1990s those figures had risen to 19% and 25% and had even doubled in certain countries. Moving beyond the fiscal arena, major public services such as education or health have also been transferred to local governments and political and electoral reforms have taken place. News headlines testify to the importance of local governance and local governments’ issues around the world.
The first implication for us, and for policy-makers and donors, is that the debate on whether decentralisation is good or bad in itself has lost its relevance. The key question is no longer whether a country should further decentralise or whether donors should support such a process. Although in different forms and to varying degrees decentralisation is there, it is part of the reality in which governments, other actors and citizens need to operate.

Welcome to this module on public policy and strategy. Strategy is a term that has become very common in both business and government, and it is likely that you have your own understanding of what it may mean. This module sets out to explore the meaning of strategy generally, and more specifically as a feature of the work of governments and public authorities.
It is written for people who are engaged in the processes of strategy development, policy-making, implementation and evaluation, whether as professionals, politicians, advisors or citizens.

The module covers an extensive range of issues and, in the next eight weeks, you will study a wide spectrum of topics associated with the relationship between the IMF and macroeconomic stabilisation. Because the subject matter is vast, I have tried to focus on some of the key themes and provide some indications as to where this subject matter can be studied in greater detail if or when you have time to do so.

The dissertation is a supervised piece of research on a topic that we will agree with you. The length will be 10,000 words. Before we can consider a proposal to submit a dissertation we will need to review your academic performance so far. Students wishing to take the Dissertation should ideally do so in their second or third year of study.

In this module you will learn about evaluation, and specifically about the types of evaluation that assesses the achievements of public interventions and uncover the lessons learned which have wider application. Often termed 'summative', 'ex-post', or 'post-hoc' this sort of evaluation looks back over what has changed over the course of an intervention by a public institution, and tries to answer questions such as:
What difference has our project, programme or policy made?; who has benefitted and who has been left out?; did our intervention deliver what we expected and hoped it would?; were the resources spent on it justified by the results achieved?; what else might account for the changes that have happened?; should we continue doing this sort of thing, and what have we learned to help us do better in the future?

This module aims to introduce you to the theory and practice of public finance, with special reference to how governments raise and use revenues. It is concerned with taxation, borrowing and aid. There are economic principles that bear on the issues of financing public expenditure and these are covered in the module. At the same time, however, we recognise that decisions on taxation, borrowing and aid are not taken solely with reference to economics but also to politics, and the module raises relevant political and social issues too. While the module has some emphasis on taxation in poorer countries, they are not its exclusive concern.

The module covers an extensive range of issues and, in the next eight weeks, you will study a wide spectrum of topics associated with the relationship between the IMF and macroeconomic stabilisation. Because the subject matter is vast, I have tried to focus on some of the key themes and provide some indications as to where this subject matter can be studied in greater detail if or when you have time to do so.

This course has been specially designed to increase the depth of your understanding of macroeconomics by focusing on the relationship between financial markets and macroeconomics. We place the subject in a real-world context, aiming to show how theoretical and empirical knowledge of macroeconomics and financial markets provides ways to analyse the salient problems faced by modern macroeconomic policy makers.

It is widely recognised by academic economists and policymakers that developed and efficient banking and capital markets are an important prerequisite for economic growth. However, it is also recognised that banking and financial crises can cause abrupt slowdowns or reversals of growth. The drive to understand these phenomena has generated a large body of research, leading to new theories and empirical studies of key features of banking and capital markets. This literature provides the underpinning for the subject material of this module.

The dissertation is a supervised piece of research on a topic that we will agree with you. The length will be 10,000 words. Before we can consider a proposal to submit a dissertation we will need to review your academic performance so far. Students wishing to take the Dissertation should ideally do so in their second or third year of study.