 Is it possible to save money on bureaucracy?Andrey Klimenko and
Nikolay Klishch
Public administration issues, 2013, issue 3, 90-109 Abstract: Bureaucracy is apt to grow extensively, which manifests itself in its unreasonably broadened powers, staff increase and hence more expenses on their provision in agencies. These regularities are described by V. Niskanen in the model of "a maximizing bureaucrat." Though, this model can be changed by reforms in the public administration through central government decisions on freezing/reducing budget financing, finding and cutting down on excessive bureaucratic functions, introducing mechanisms to stimulate performance.The change of the model is especially relevant in the conditions when extra budget financing is obviously necessary to keep up with the competitive level of salaries in Civil service. It is the situation in the Russian Federation that has been lately, when decisions to increase salaries in the military and law-enforcement services have been realized, and a big salary increase in public administration for the nearest years is being planned. So, it is quite natural for the problem of saving reserves and reducing the number of employees in the public administration apparatus to arise.After analyzing the dynamics of the number of bureaucrats as such over the last years, and the number of people employed in the economy, the authors came to the conclusion that the quantity of the civil servants does not depend only on the number of the population, but also on the volume and the order of carrying out administration functions.The article indicates two main directions of making expenditures on public officers more effective: (1) by extra public administration functions and services reduction; (2) by improving the inner organization of performance, making the processes and procedures simpler, by controlling and stimulating economical spending of the means/money. The authors suggest a set of measures in the frame of these directions that can secure saving the budget money. Keywords: bureaucracy; «budget-maximising bureaucrat»; expenditure for maintaining the bureaucratic apparatus; excessive powers (functions); civil servants; competitive level of compensation package (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nos:vgmu00:2013:i:3:p:90-109 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Public administration issues from Higher School of Economics |
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