Using surveys and selected country case studies, this monograph identifies the factors driving human resource management reforms in the national public administrations of OECD countries.

Public service reform, or public sector reform, has been a hot topic among political scientists in recent years as most existing government structures are inadequate to cope with the ever-changing environments of globalism in terms of capital and technology. This is particularly true among Asian countries where the traditional bureaucracy has been strong as compared to a relatively weak sense of community. Traditional relations between government, the business sector and labour, which slowly have taken shape in the last two decades, are now once again challenged through de-colonialization in Hong Kong, democratization in Korea, decentralization in Singapore and technological innovation in Japan. This timely collection addresses a variety of selected reform issues confronted by these four developed Asian economies. The areas of reform covered range from human resource management, financial management and pay reform, to central agency role, service improvements, private sector involvement and political accountability.

A market economy and a more liberal society have brought great challenges to China’s outdated governance structure and personnel management. To improve decision-making in government and reshape the management system in face of a more complex economy, post-Mao authorities have implemented a number of administrative reforms, including civil service reform which emphasized on selecting and promoting public officials based on their capability and work performance. Thousands of positions have been filled since the civil service system was implemented nationwide in 1993. The Chinese civil service reform is of far-reaching significance because it had the potential to be a departure from the established structure of cadre personnel management system developed in the 1950s. However, after several years of policy development, scholars observe that the new reforms have done little to undermine the old cadre system. Is this true? Or does this conclusion over-simplify the complicated implementation of the reforms? This book examines the implementation and performance of the on-going civil service reforms in China. Using the principal-agent framework, the author draw upon key case studies showing how the reforms affect civil servants’ incentives and behavior in the local context and the Chinese leadership’s control over the bureaucracy. China’s reform experience speaks directly to many Asian countries facing urgent need to improve state capacity as the global financial crisis unfolds.

This report assesses the impact of pay reforms on pay dispersion in the public service. To do so, it draws on recent experiences in Australia, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Although many industrialized countries have had to face the same political and economic pressures in reforming their public sectors there have been different reactions and a diversity of solutions to the emerging problems. This book examines the most significant initiatives targeted towards the restructuring of public sector employment relations in countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The contributors focus on national and local governments, and health, education and social services. The first section provides an up-to-date analysis of six European countries. The second part considers the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Japan.

While public administration practice and education in general has become considerably professionalized in the last decade, existing knowledge on public administration in Southeast Asia is fragmented at best, and often devoid of a useful reference. While journal articles and government reports provide decentralized information, Public Administration in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Macao takes a comprehensive and comparative look at the major components of administration systems. The selection of countries and regions included reflects the diversity of Southeast Asia. Organized by Country The handbook fills a critical need by bringing together leading scholars who provide an insider perspective and viewpoint on essential and advanced issues. Divided into five sections, each dedicated to a particular country, the text outlines topics relevant to modern public administration, including: History and Political Context of Public Administration Decentralization and Local Governance Public Ethics and Corruption Performance Management Reforms Civil Service System Focusing on recent developments in public administration in these countries which are among the fastest growing economies in the world, the book explores their practices and innovative approaches in public administration. For many years people have been fascinated by the cultures, peoples, and governments of Southeast Asia, and now they have a book that discusses the apparatus of government in Southeast Asia – their agencies, contexts, processes, and values.

The research is based on the assumption that management reforms cause changes in municipal administration and its person-job fit. The theoretical description of the problem is possible by drawing on Edward's (1991) person-job fit theorem. Literature on modernisation concepts as e.g. the New Public Management (NPM) shows a general awareness of reforms' consequences on the personnel. The human capital theory delivers explanations for the incentive to react of both the organisation's executive level as well as the employees, in case management reforms cause a discrepancy in person job-fit. The conducted empirical studies confirm that management reforms do result in changes with impact on the person-job fit. The literature research brought evidence that NPM has only been adopted partially. Since the transformation, some reforms and changes in legislation have laid the foundation for a self-governmental administration that scores compared to the EU standard as relatively modern. The investigated Polish municipalities react on the changes in the person job fit. For example, employees do learn in a self-organised way. The administration reacts on the discrepancies mainly by recruiting new staff and by reallocating the tasks. Training is not applied systematically as means to problem solving and is available in many cases only in the context of externally financed projects, and even then not oriented towards individual needs. Changes do have enormous consequences for the personnel management of municipal administration. They change the requirements for the job holders substantially, and the administrations seem not able to react on the changes in a way that the personnel is enabled to meet the requirements. Unclear is if such an objective seems feasible if one considers the extreme dimensions of change, that spread between the paradigms of socialist administration and modernisation concepts in the sense of NPM.