The Project

Project content and aims

While during the post-war decades public services were mainly provided by the state, recent decades have seen a wave of liberalisation and privatisation of public services in the European Union. So far, evaluations of these privatisation processes have largely focussed on price development and, in some cases, on the compliance of privatisation with specific quality standards. These assessments rarely took into account the impact of privatisation on employment and productivity in a cross-country and cross-sector perspective.

The European research project PIQUE attempts to close this gap by investigating the relationship between employment, productivity and the quality of public services in the process of liberalisation and privatisation. The project’s main hypothesis is that decent employment and working conditions impact positively on productivity and service quality while the provision of decent employment and working conditions depends on the regulation of liberalisation and privatisation processes and the resulting market and ownership structures. The level of the company is crucial in this respect as it is in the companies that decisions about specific strategies are made, which then shape the relationship between employment, productivity and service quality. The project is highly innovative because it integrates results from different dimensions that are usually researched separately (regulation, employment, productivity, quality) and does so by crossing national and sectoral boundaries. It is also innovative because it actually goes into companies to assess the impact at the point of service delivery.

Funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme, Priority 7, Citizens and the Knowledge Based Society, and coordinated by Forschungs- und Beratungstelle Arbeitswelt, Vienna, PIQUE is a three-year project covering four sectors – electricity, postal services, local public transport and health services/hospitals – and six European countries – Austria, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Sweden and the UK.

Both sectors and countries have been selected because they represent a wide variety of sector- and country-specific peculiarities and the challenges typical of the liberalisation and privatisation of public services across Europe. In addition to various project reports, output of the project will include a number of policy papers summarising key project results, a newsletter, a series of workshops for policy-makers and stakeholders as well as an international conference to be held in Spring 2009.