Sborník 2009 díl 2. - Fakulta informatiky a managementu - Univerzita ...

Renata Przygodzka PUBLIC ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT
OF REGIONS
makes it quite difficult for new methods and concepts in management based on New
Public Management to become popular.
Providing public goods and services
Contemporary regions more and more often are treated as entrepreneurial organizations,
the purpose of which is, according to the menial role of territorial self-governments, to
fulfill the collective needs of the society by rendering commonly available services
according to qualitative standards typical to the private sector. This special rendering
function of public organizations has until recently been limited to execution of social
policy and included tasks in the field of employment ,education, health protection,
social protection, social dialogue and housing. Currently, however, the scope of public
services includes other tasks, which, although devoid of social nature, are used for
fulfilling social needs. These services may thus be divided into three primary groups [2,
p. 97-98]:
1. social type services (education, health protection);
2. services technical in nature (water pipelines, sewerage discharge, environmental
protection, public communication);
3. transfer services in the field of social services (social insurances, social care).
Public services are usually rendered by public organizations. However, more and more
often the studies indicate that it is usually the most costly form of fulfilling the social
needs, which does not guarantee high standards of services and is not always citizenfriendly.
Thus, more and more often private entities are included in the public goods
and services providing processes by means of a system of bids, licenses and
permissions. In the face of more and more advanced and costly infrastructural
technologies, inter-sector cooperation gains special significance, in particular publicprivate
partnership, thanks to which a significant number of investment projects has
been executed in many countries.
Building the region’s competitive advantages
Proper regional management and effective, rational and efficient provision of public
goods and services undoubtedly leads to achieving competitive advantages. The
ambiguity of the "competitiveness" concept results in the many definition approaches
and measurement methods being present in literature 4 . Nevertheless one may agree that
the most universal definition understands competitiveness as the ability to profitably sell
the produced goods and services.
Competitiveness understood in this way is based on a certain social system, in which
mutual reactions (interactions) of the factors, process participants, which affect it,
executed at various levels (meta, macro, mezzo and micro), leads to building
competitive advantages [3, p. 2].
4 The difficulties in defining the concept of competitiveness should be sought in numerous prerequisites.
One of them is the fact that it is more and more often considered on four levels, micro-, mezzo-, macro-
and mega-competitiveness. Other reasons are, for instance, deriving the concept of competitiveness from
at least three economical theorems (foreign trade, economic growth and microeconomics, multiplicity of
classification etc. [7, 12-13].
186