Public administration is both the implementation of public policy in government bureaucracies and the academic study that prepares civil servants for work in those organizations.

Public administration is a broad field that covers the administrative services needed to help build and strengthen society. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) defines it as a branch of study that prepares you to serve as a public service manager in local, state or federal government.

Public policy is a process about selecting strategies and making choices. Public policy can be studied as producing three types of policies (distributive, regulatory and re-distributive) related with decision making process. Public administration is the set of processes, structures, functions, methods and procedures.

Public administration is the implementation of government policy and also an academic discipline that studies this implementation and prepares civil employees for working in the public service. Public administrators are public employees working in public departments and agencies, at all levels of government.

Generally speaking, there are three different common approaches to understanding public administration: Classical Public Administration Theory, New Public Management Theory, and Postmodern Public Administration Theory, offering different perspectives of how an administrator practices public administration.

What Does a Public Administrator Do?

• Transportation.
• Community and economic development.
• Public health/social services.
• Education/higher education.
• Parks and recreation.
• Housing.
• Law enforcement and public safety.
• Emergency management.

Cloete (1967:58) provides the functions of public administration in terms of the generic functions, namely, policy-making, organising, financing, staffing, determining work methods and procedures and controlling.

Public administration, the implementation of government policies. Today public administration is often regarded as including also some responsibility for determining the policies and programs of governments. Specifically, it is the planning, organizing, directing, coordinating, and controlling of government operations.

Cloete propagated that public administration comprises six generic administrative processes or functions: policy- making, organizing, financing, personnel provision and utilization, determination of work procedures and control.

The importance of public administration as a Governmental Instrument. Government’s most important function is to rule, i.e. to maintain peace and order as well as protect the lives and property of its citizens. This important function of Government is expedited through the instrument of public administration.

Public administration, on the other hand, is concerned mainly with organized political life. Sociology may be considered as a general social science, whereas Public administration is a specialized social science dealing with society’s administrative aspects only.

Public administration is not law. A public administrator has considerable freedom in interpreting and moulding the laws passed by the legislature. He is the real effective force and authority in implementing the provisions of every law.

Sociology provides material to Political Science: Human social relations are the determinants of all political relations. All political institutions are conditioned by social relations. All political activity is the result of the social nature of man. Sociology contributes to Political Science the knowledge of society.

As far as practical significance is concerned, sociology helps public management to pay attention to social facts rather than relying solely on the research norms of data analysis, and help people to maintain and improve the existing social structure, social system, and reform of society.

Sociology is the study of society, social relationships, interactions, and culture that surrounds our life….Sociology.

Economics is the social science that deals with factors of production, consumption of goods and services and resource management. Sociology is the study of human behaviour, development and how different human societies function under different organizational structures.

Economic sociology analyzes economic phenomena such as markets, corporations, property rights, and work using the tools of sociology. It shares economic theory’s attention to the role of interests and rationality, but also emphasizes the importance of social relations and social institutions.

When economic sociologists do focus on individuals, it is generally to examine the ways in which their interests, beliefs, and motivations to act are mutually constituted through the interactions between them.

(1) Sociology is the study of social relationships or social activities but Economics is the study of only the economic activities of man. (2) Sociology is abstract in nature whereas Economics is concrete. (6) Both Sociology and Economics differ from each other in respect of various methods they use for their study.

Karl Marx

Four key economic concepts—scarcity, supply and demand, costs and benefits, and incentives—can help explain many decisions that humans make.

The allocation of scarce resources and the distribution of the final goods and services are the central problems of any economy.