Management Accounting in Public Service Decision Making

Chapter4

Public service reforms

Introduction

Public service reform has been a major theme in public services for many decades and has manifested itself in many different ways across different countries (Colgan et al. 2016). Moreover, it is reasonable to assume that the pressures of increased service demand and financial austerity mentioned in Chapter 1 means that public service reform should be seen as an ongoing process of evolution and not a series of past historic events. Thus, the process of public service reform will continue to pose challenges to public service management for the foreseeable future.

Effective management accounting has a strong role to play in this process of public service reform, and this role encompasses both:

• The ...