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The European Union (EU) is putting emphasis on the need to change the composition of public expenditures to what, according to the public policies endogenous models, is considered a high quality of public finances (i.e., a higher share of productive expenditures). These recommendations are the same for all EU member states. Together with the fiscal requirements arising from the Maastricht Treaty and the Stability and Growth Pact, EU authorities are promoting a one-size-fits-all fiscal policy model. Our paper analyzes the differences existing in the composition of public expenditures in the EU. If this composition is significantly different, that would mean that in the EU there are differences in the national preferences about the role/size of public expenditures, something that would not allow implementing a single model of public sector and fiscal policy. Keywords: cluster analysis, composition of public expenditures, convergence, European Union, productive expenditures JEL Classification Codes: H50, P48, P52, Since the mid-1990s the process of European integration has involved the implementation of general and common criteria for fiscal policies, both for European Monetary Union (EMU) member states and candidate [...]

This article investigates the difficulties associated with the sustainability of implementing donor supported public sector reform respecting human and institutional capacity building interventions in Ghana. It is based on an exploratory case study design; it triangulates both secondary and primary sources of data. Employing self-completing questionnaire and interview schedule tools it covered 105 local government employees from national, regional, and district levels as well as interviewed 16 senior public officers in 9 public and quasi-public organizations. These primary sources were complemented with relevant secondary documents. The article finds that donor funded public sector reform initiatives can either facilitate or constrain the expected improvement promised by reform due to the financial and technical resource inadequacies experienced in Ghana. In this regard, public sector reformers have to become innovative and adaptive in delivering public services, since the mechanistic donor-driven reform agenda tends to affect the quality of service delivery.

Cutback management in the public sector poses unique problems. More than 30 years ago, Charles Levine illustrated these problems by discussing the paradoxes of cutback management in public organizations. Building on Levine's work on cutback management and developments in publicness theory, the author provides a contemporary perspective on cutback management. He asserts that publicness creates paradoxical tensions in different domains such as organizational goals, employee motivation, and organizational performance. These tensions need to be embraced in both theoretical discussions of and practical engagement with cutback management. Instead of a short-term, reductionist approach to cutback management, a holistic and long-term perspective is necessary.

Collective consumption and benefit characterize many government services. Moreover, government services are mostly paid for collectively through taxes-there is little or no relationship between the taxes paid by a household and its use of a particular service. Public sector decision makers face complex budget problems with difficult solutions. Involving citizens meaningfully in these decisions has long been a conundrum. The authors teamed up with the town of West Hartford, Connecticut, to develop a Web-based survey to overcome some of these participation problems and help decision makers better understand citizen preferences. The Web survey allowed for real-time interactivity and was tailored to present respondents with trade-offs between service levels and taxes.

An analysis on the reasons and the methods of government treasury's toughness on public sector pay is described.

An analysis of law, finance, and economic growth in China is presented. The state sector and listed sector are constrained by law, finance, and growth, but the private sector in the country is showing a robust growth. The implication of this disparity is that there are alternative financing channels and governance operating in the economy, like reputation and relationships.

A conference of top civil servants was held to discuss about the efficiency savings fund raising in the public sector. The details of the meeting that was arranged by the Public Finance magazine are presented.

The characteristic of problems of managing complex project is generic in nature, across all types of organization. The critical mess is an unstable stage in a project, when a single change can result in two or more problems.

The second generation of the Local Public Service Agreements (LPSAs) is an agreement between the council, its partners and government. The starting point for the agreement will be the community strategic through local strategic partnership.

A theoretical framework, in the context of the debates about public-service reform in the U.K., to study the issues of competition and incentives without relying on the standard profit-oriented market model, is discussed. The concerns about the consequences of allowing more flexibility in mission design and competition on inequality is presented.

The features determining the effectiveness of public-service delivery are examined. Some of these public-service deliveries include incentives for employees and teams within organizations providing public services, the structure of the organization and the competitive framework that it faces, and the role of the private sector.

Two specialists on fiscal policy in the Czech Republic examine the deterioration of that country's fiscal position during the late 1990s and outline its causes and consequences. Particular attention is devoted to developments in the government sector, extra-budgetary activities, sources of revenue, patterns of government spending, hidden liabilities, and structural and cyclical fiscal imbalances. The authors also assess in some detail the political environment within which fiscal policy is formulated and describe possible outcomes should the current situation and policies continue.

The fiscal rules set in the Treaty of Maastricht and in the Stability and Growth Pact have sometimes been criticised as an excessively binding constraint for appropriate counter-cyclical action. The risk that the rules may permanently reduce the public sector's contribution to capital accumulation has also been pointed out. In this framework, the adoption of a 'golden rule' has been suggested. Starting from the recent debate, this paper tackles two questions: (a) the implications of the Pact for public investment and (b) the pros and cons of introducing a golden rule in EMU's fiscal framework, given the objectives of low public debts and adequate margins for a stabilising budgetary policy. The analysis suggests that the rules set in the Treaty and in the Pact may negatively influence public investment spending. However, the golden rule, although intuitively appealing, does not seem to be an appropriate solution to the problem.

This paper describes an application of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to a capital rationing decision problem. The Istanbul Water and Sewerage Administration (IWSA) was granted a loan of $650 million offered by the World Bank to allocate among several water provision and waste water treatment projects. A project selection process solely based upon the benefit-cost analysis would not be sufficient to reflect the IWSA's social and political goals. Thus the AHP methodology is employed to express all quantifiable and non-quantifiable factors as a single model. Such a model provides the weights of the projects based upon the preferences and judgements of the IWSA managers. Then it becomes necessary to determine the multi-project schedule within the stated credit conditions over a 15-year planning horizon. To serve this purpose, a mixed integer linear model is formulated to provide the best project start up portfolio with a feasible credit outlay. Several IWSA managers participated both in the AHP stage of forming the hierarchical structure, assessing the matrix weights and in the mathematical modelling stage of determining project durations, cost and revenue figures. The solution presented to the IWSA management is approved to be implemented in their strategic course of action., INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study is to solve the capital rationing problem of the Istanbul Water and Sewerage Administration (IWSA) by employing an integration between the Analytical Hierarchy Process [...]

5.1 Public finance Public sector finance has deteriorated dramatically in recent years, from a surplus equivalent to more than 4 per cent of GDP in 1990 to an estimated deficit [...]