A Public Road to Globalization: Public Services and Customer Internationalization in Israel

Public service leaders increasingly behave as public entrepreneurs in search of new funding sources for cash-strapped institutions. This study focuses attention on customer internationalization-that is the extension of public services to individual foreign clients-as an important emerging form of public sector commercialization. The main objective is to characterize this new phenomenon in terms of motivation, process, and probable outcomes. Special attention is dedicated to customer internationalization's impact on the access to quality and equity of services for domestic service recipients. Based on a cross-field comparison of customer internationalization in Israeli universities and hospitals, this study explores this new phenomenon and highlights its ambiguous effect on services for domestic clients.