I suspect a large source of that sentiment is just marketing, companies need to go out and sell their accomplishments, whereas a civil servant can stop once the job is done. The politicians on the other hand seems to spend most of their time selling promises about the future, rather than things they have actually done.
The reason why typically government institutions are less efficient is that there is no inherent incentive for them to be efficient. A competitive market, on the other hand, inherently rewards efficiency.
Of course, there's nothing inherently preventing government institutions from being efficient. That can happen when you have the right people doing the right thing. However, you really want to have a system that makes the wrong people do the right thing.
Anyone who thinks governments are as efficient in acquiring, retaining, nurturing talent AND equal or better execution then commercial entities, should accept the challenge of getting a government job and see how that feels likes. The exceptions like Estonia and Singapore are rare and far between but should be studied.
Also, lots of militaries around the world - including the US military - are contracting out to PMCs.
Military equipment is usually procured from private companies.
Also, most militaries are sitting there idle most of the time, so they're only competing on paper.
However, that also makes it easier to do the same in times of peace.
I observe this reaching for ideological explanations extremely frequently in US media and citizens, and these lazy rationalizations seem to me to be one of the ways the US public sphere collectively hallucinates that that they are the freest and first in the world, while promoting ideological tribalism and partisanship, as citizens vote away their interests to protect their ideological delusion.
I'd argue that the "smaller country" explanation is also over-used.
For example, when single-payer healthcare, gun control or effective government comes up, I often hear the excuse "The US is way more populous than $nation_x so it would never work here!".
When asked to further explain their reasoning, many (certainly not all) can't seem to. It's like they never think past the nation-size excuse because it's simply accepted as fact.
I suppose what I was getting at was the distance of the highest levels of government from the citizen. Taiwan certainly isn't a small country, but its government is certainly in a closer relationship with its citizens concerns than the federal government is with US citizens.
Generally theres rules. Generally the rules can be changed. But generally rules don't get broken.
This may have been true in the 90s when Singapore was transforming it's economy but it's not true now and hasn't been the case in over a decade. It's a country with a large service economy, well educated workforce, and burgeoning middle class. It's also very tiny with a strong national identity. If the government says they are going to do something, unlike the US, the public trusts they are going to do it.
This would be harder in a city where lots of things date back to the 19th Century, and architects were rarely involved in building them.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-24873-5_...
Not really. Especially if you've been there. Singapore is considered one of the more nimble governments of the world. But it's easy to be so when you have a small population in a small area.