Policy Memo 43 How to Improve Governance Efficiency in Romania, August 2013, Authors: Dragos Dinu, Victor Giosan
The aim of this report is to review the main developments in Romania’s strategic planning mechanism, to highlight the challenges the Government is facing in prioritising, planning and financing their public policies to provide a few suggestions for the future.
The report is organised in three sections looking at (1) the general approach of the reform in the public administration, (2) drafting and coordinating the public policies, and (3) the strategic planning policies. Each section presents briefly the main reform measures achieved, the current challenges and, where appropriate, recommendations for improving the current situation.
An overview of the public administration reform shows that despite indisputable evolutions during the last 20 years in transitioning from communism to a democratic government system, we are on the last place among EU Member States in terms of governance efficiency, while lack of vision, bureaucracy or excessive politicising to the detriment of a meritocratic approach remain issues constantly criticised by our international partners. We also emphasise that the pace of reforms slowed down after the accession to the European Union and we are still struggling to bring our administrative capacity back to its level of 2007. We lack clear vision on reforming the administration or a public policy document (a strategy) for this purpose. Romanian administration is still faced with a high level of politicising, circumstantial political decisions and a lack of valuation of the public policy analysis, excessive emphasis on procedures to the detriment of content, lack of prioritisation and allocation of budget resources without performance criteria or obsolete control systems for the management of human resources and budgets.
Full report, in English, in available here.