The role of external suppliers in delivering services to the public and to government has been expanded significantly over the past forty years. This report assesses where outsourcing has worked and where it has not, and why, and makes recommendations on how to improve the way government contracts out services.

This issues paper argues that while outsourcing is not uniformly good or bad, services with a principally academic market seem to be especially susceptible to monopoly or oligopoly dynamics among commercial providers.

Digital age platforms are providing researchers the ability to outsource portions of their work – not just to increasingly intelligent machines, but also to a relatively low-cost online labor force comprised of humans. These so-called “online outsourcing” services help employers connect with a global pool of free-agent workers who are willing to complete a variety...

This paper examines transparency and the performance of outsourced government services. It discusses three aspects of outsourcing: value-for-money efficiency, effectiveness of performance, and publicity of performance information, and explores a number of lessons for both government and public sector managers on how to increase the extent of transparency, and thus the quality, of outsourced services.