In my opinion, this whole situation is going in a wrong direction. And the right questions are certainly not asked. What’s the use of drastically limiting wages in the public sector if we do not even have a transparent salary grid for civil servants? The only criterion for advancement in the public sector is the patriarchal Japanese model: the more you stay in office, the more money you get. No schemes for penalties and rewards, no key performance indicators, no effective performance reviews. The solution? Let’s just cut wages… A solution that fails to address the real problem, and it does so miserably.

There have been numerous government-sponsored programmes for training public managers, with investments exceeding millions of Euro per year, resulting in hundreds of young Romanians trained abroad and flown in back home to assume a leading role in the administration. There are numerous young people, educated abroad or currently working in the private sector who would make a great job as responsible civil servants. Management authorities for coordinating structural funds in Romania are badly in need of skilled labour, while other ministries would definitely benefit from skilled staff, too. Instead, the new government simply announced it will suspend hiring for the 145,000 vacant positions in the administration. Again, I am definitely missing something…

Ministries and subsidiary government agencies are packed with political appointees. Ridiculous political witch-hunts take place in the public sector every four years when a new executive comes in office. I admit heads of ministries, agencies and authorities have to be politically appointed. How about the rest of the staff? Sometimes, politics is so prevalent in the hierarchical organization of the public sector administration that even beginners are politically appointed. One of the key solutions to having an efficient administration is to make it less political. For now, this remains, like all others, nothing more than a line in a “Public Management” coursebook…