Public Management In Times Of Austerity

Since 2008, the world has experienced an enormous decrease of wealth. By many measures the impact of the crisis was severe. The fall in GDP, the collapse of world trade, the rise in unemployment, and the credit slump reached bigger proportions than in any other crisis since World War II. Although the economic figures seem to improve in some countries, the crisis continues being a challenging issue and is said to be one of the most important problems governments face today. The crisis has put public finances under ever increasing pressure, and governments have responded through austerity measures such as new fiscal rules and budgeting procedures and cutbacks of public spending. Public Management in Times of Austerity seeks to explore the austerity policies adopted by European governments and their consequences to public management. It asks how governments have implemented new rules leading to more stringency in public budgeting and financial management, and how they have cut back public expenditure. These questions are examined comparatively through case studies in different parts of Europe, and variations across countries are discussed and explained. Throughout the volume, the consequences of the crisis and austerity policies for public management are discussed. What is the relationship between crisis and decision-making in the public sector, and how does austerity affect public-sector organisation? As the previous crisis in the 1970s resulted in a major reform movement, which was later referred to as New Public Management, Public Management in Times of Austerity look to understand whether the current crisis also leads to a wave of public management reform, and if so what is the content of this?

This book provides a comparative analysis of the processes and impacts of austerity measures introduced in the field of Local Public Services (LPS) across Mediterranean Europe. The book describes and compares the trajectories of austerity, and the types of effects. It investigates how many (and what kind of) different responses were given to similar inputs and under the influence of what factors in order to understand if there are regularities in the way that the Mediterranean countries adopted and implemented the austerity measures and how these latter impacted on local government and LPS management and delivery. The book is a product of a sub network from the COST Action LocRef IS1207 and analyses seven countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Cyprus and Albania).

This is the thoroughly revised fourth edition of the widely-used and established standard text on public management reform. The new edition retains the historical perspective back to 1980, but now directly addresses the pervasive effects of the Global Economic Crisis of 2008 on public sectors in the three continents covered.

Challenging some of the established practices of public policy and administration, which have been called into question by the financial and banking crises of 2008, this title investigates public sector management and the public managers acting in the interests of civil society to get to the heart of best practice.

While the implementation of evidence-based medicine guidelines is well studied, there has been little investigation into the extent to which a parallel evidence-based management movement has been influential within health care organizations. This book explores the various management knowledges and associated texts apparent in English health care organizations, and considers how the local reception of these texts was influenced by the macro level political economy of public services reform evident during the period of the politics of austerity. The research outlined in this volume shows that very few evidence-based management texts are apparent within health care organizations, despite the influence of certain knowledge producers, such as national agencies, think tanks, management consultancies, and business schools in the industry. Bringing together the often disconnected academic literature on management knowledge and public policy, the volume addresses the ways in which preferred management knowledges and texts in these publicly funded settings are sensitive to the macro level political economy of public services reform, offering an empirically grounded critique of the evidence-based management movement.

This report argues that any new approaches to public sector pay must help to: enhance external competitiveness of salaries; promote internal equity throughout the public sector; reflect the values of public organisations; and align compensation with government’s core strategic objectives.

Contemporary public managers find themselves under pressure on many fronts. Coming off a sustained period of growth in their funding and some complacency about their performance, they now face an environment of ferocious competitiveness abroad and austerity at home. Public managers across Australia and New Zealand are finding themselves wrestling with expenditure reduction, a smaller public sector overall, sustained demands for productivity improvement, and the imperative to think differently about the optimal distribution of responsibilities between states, markets and citizens. Given ever-shrinking resources, in terms of staffing, budgets and time, how can public managers and public services become more productive, more outcome-driven and more agile? How can we achieve better alignment between ever-growing citizen expectations and the realities of constrained service provision? What can we learn from the best combination of innovation and austerity already being delivered in other countries and sectors, including harnessing the grounded wisdom of frontline service delivery practitioners? This book focuses on practical ways public managers at home and abroad are dealing with these shared dilemmas. It brings together renowned scholars in the fields of public sector productivity, performance management, ‘frugal innovation’ and budget stringency, with leading international and Australasian practitioners sharing their successes and challenges.

This book deals with the critical empirical void created by the speed at which healthcare restructuring has taken place in Europe. Chapters explore the political uncertainty and budgetary pressures which have led governments increasingly to turn to New Public Management (NPM)-style reforms to attempt to balance the financial viability of public health structures, with democratic imperatives to maintain socially just outcomes. The authors of this volume consider how governments have therefore shifted identities from principal care providers to contractual monitors, setting targets increasingly directed toward third-party managers in quasi-markets and the private sector. Drawing upon extensive data from Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, and Israel, the contributions explore the often unexpected policy outputs and outcomes engendered by such reforms.