In much of the international public administration literature, New Public Management (NPM) already appears to be bogged down in a quagmire of critical revisions and assessments. Although some criticisms are well founded, there can be no doubt that NPM represents a trend which has considerably affected public‐sector decision‐making worldwide. This article takes the examples of the Southern European bureaucracies, where NPM‐inspired reforms were introduced later than in the English‐speaking world, but have nevertheless played a decisive role in the political agenda of both socialist and conservative governments. The paper presents the results of a comparative study of administrative reforms in five European countries as well as the USA during the 1980s and 1990s. The comparison is based on three specific dimensions (central bureaucracies’ formal structure; civil service organization; administrative processes), enabling us to systematically measure and compare the progress of the various countries subsequent to the cycle of managerial reforms.
Italy's economic and employment problems were to a large extent home made, whereas external economic and political pressures did facilitate internal revitalization. While export‐oriented industries in northern Italy had maintained international competitiveness, overall employment rates were very low, and inflation was very high until the early 1990s. Since the clientelistic Italian state was not able to put the brakes on the spiral of wage and price increases that were automatically linked to all sorts of public and welfare‐state expenditures, public‐sector deficits were rising inexorably. After the collapse of the old party system, however, the unions were able and willing to enter into a series of accords with successive reform governments that not only facilitated price stability through wage restraint but that also legitimated significant welfare cutbacks that contributed to budget consolidation. The impetus for reform was a serious political commitment to meet the stringent Maastricht criteria in order to ensure Italy's membership in the European Monetary Union.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.