I’m attending a conference on outsourcing at the Centre for Applied Economic Research at the University of NSW*. It’s been very interesting so far and the program for today also looks good (at the Rupert Myers theatre if anyone wants to drop in).

In talking with organiser Kevin Fox, though, it turned out, to my surprise that he was unable to get a speaker, or even any delegates, from the Commonwealth government. The Productivity Commission, which pushed competitive tendering very hard in the early 1990s, is no longer working on the topic, and the Department of Finance showed no interest at all.

It can scarcely be supposed that the issues have all been resolved. On the face of things, efforts at competitive tendering have produced both some big successes (the Productivity Commission claims this for the Job Network) and some glaring failures (the program to outsource Commonwealth IT). It would surely be useful to consider what worked and what didn’t.

This is, I suppose, part of the general problem that a lot more time is spent on making the case for (and against) policy initiatives than on evaluating them after they are implemented.

*If academics had any market power, these would be the ideal occasions to organise a cartel!