Incentives, culture, mechanics, motivations, personalities, beliefs, scope, competition: all of those things play additional parts. And there's good governance

Incentives, culture, mechanics, motivations, personalities, beliefs, scope, competition: all of those things play additional parts. And there's good governance and strategy and bad governance and strategy that applies at all those institutions at all levels and size. I can't really agree with the "more waste and less accountability on one side compared to the other", but that's primarily because the terms/measurements are so poorly defined and they differ so much country to country, state to state and with subject matter, and as I said, I believe that as institutions grow/mature, private industry must implement government anyway. I guess what i'd rail against most is the idea that its the private/public idea itself that plays the significant part in efficiency and productivity: the idea that subsidising private industry, public-private partnerships, or privatising certain public roles or firms/industries somehow magically, by itself, makes things "more efficient". If i were to reflect back on my own career, of the three top efficient organizations, two were medium-sized government departments, and the third was a small team non-profit of about 5 on a small government funding arrangement. Worst three were all private industry: big corp, big consultancy, little firm (although, admittedly, funded by government). Private industry had a huge problem with people being motivated by profits, rather than doing the job: hence directly incentivizing a seeking of inefficiency if not in a fully competitive market (which in the real world, is most markets these days, and certainly most markets with players of any scale). There's a couple of throw-away populist lines I could give about the secret of efficiency I've observed, but i'll chose three: motivation/incentives, devolve responsibility down to the person best able to make the decision, and preference hands off and less work over more (which, to me, is almost the secret success of efficient free-market economies, the ability to just step back and use organic structures to just let things happen).