But private provision of telephones, electricity and water has vastly increased their coverage and quality.
If state benefits are cut, more of the burden will fall on private provision.
The spread of private provision into core public services like medical care or schools has been glacial.
The government's current push, as the Jarvis contract shows, is private provision of services to school managements.
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Altogether, state benefits account for about 60% of pensioner income, with the remaining 40% coming from private provision.
New financing modalities for the private provision of public goods are another possibility.
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Extending FoI would bring "disinfecting transparency" to the private provision of public services, he told the Labour Party conference.
He and his colleagues considered the pension system in the round, taking into account both state and private provision.
Education and health care are other areas in which affluent Brazilians have chosen private provision over poor state services.
Since the 1970s, American social policy has been drifting steadily towards private provision.
The problem is that we cannot rely on a competitive market regime for economically efficient private provision of public goods.
In the past three decades, governments have accepted a huge expansion of private provision, much of it by for-profit outfits.
Its plan has been to concentrate state benefits more on lower earners, leaving everyone else even more reliant on private provision.
The main task of the review will be to find ways to reduce reliance on the state by encouraging private provision.
The initially radical bill, which would give family doctors more power to commission services and allow private provision to expand, enraged health workers.
Those who claim the government cannot create wealth are correct only to the extent that private provision of those services would have been superior.
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But there are also some services that stand somewhere in the middle: private provision is an option, but competition is limited and fragile at best.
The unions fear that greater private provision will erode their power.
Some recent failures, such as an experiment by Baltimore's school board, have added to the conviction that private provision of state-financed education is a bad idea.
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But, where public provision of social services is the norm, as in most of continental Europe, governments have been more ambivalent, seeing private provision as a sign of state failure.
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The Labour government was so confident that this system was working that in 1998 it declared its ambition to switch these shares by 2050 to 40% from the state and 60% from private provision.
Meanwhile, though, private provision was making considerable strides.
East Hampshire began to pioneer a scheme known as "private provision", which means public houses, restaurants or churches agree to provide toilets for the general public in return for an annual sum from the council.
They will review trends from rapid growth in student numbers to the surge in private provision, address emerging new dynamics and their policy implications, examine the social responsibility of higher education, and recommend measures to promote equity and stimulate innovation and research.
On the other hand, residential and commercial streets could be more easily devolved via some form of homesteading by adjacent property owners, a possibility Walter Block has discussed in The Privatization of Roads and Highways, with its voluminous references to the history of private provision of roads.
However, successive and continuing government policies (and again this is an international phenomenon) of privatisation, contracting out, public-private partnerships, the private finance initiative, academy and free schools - all aspects of the private provision of public services - have increasingly entwined the public and private sectors and now focused attention on how far freedom of information should reach.
That is a lot of money in the world of private education provision.
While Labour was quick, after it was elected in 1997, to seize upon the welfare problems presented by an ageing population, its first initiatives focused on private pension provision.
Traditionally, the Lib Dems have been much more luke warm about private health care provision.
That would settle the argument about the relative merits of private and public provision in the state sector.
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