Issue 2009 no1 contents:

The engagement of independent experts or expert organizations in the process of delivery of public services and performing government functions is one of the most important form of public participation in the creation and/or implementation of public policy (creation of general principles as well as making specific decisions). It happens because of the lack of transparency in decision making of government agencies and lack of mechanisms of self-regulation. The article analyses current practices in engaging experts and organizations. The study is based on 250 administrative regalements of government functions and their projects. Authors study the models of interactions between the applicants, government agencies and organizations (experts). Moreover, authors study the relationship between the characteristics of the transaction on which the government function is based and the most preferable model of experts’ engaging for performance of the function.

Determination of the effectiveness of management system is an important factor of any socio-economical environment, which includes a municipal education. However various components of inner and outer environment that affect an organization, and their mobility, do not allow to determine the effectiveness with maximum precision. One of the possible approaches is to form a system of managerial monitoring for municipal education. Monitoring also requires determination of its effectiveness. In this article the author suggests various methods to determine effectiveness of managerial monitoring in municipal education. The author developed criteria and indicators of the effectiveness of managerial monitoring, and methods of its determination as well as a direction towards improvement of the monitoring system.

World public management reforms have revealed the increased demand for conscientiousness of office workers as the main tendency of our time. Pointing out the diversity of acts on the principles of employees’ behaviours, the author notes that they all enact honest and professional fulfillment of official duties to say nothing of the behaviour that an be misinterpreted as infringements. Considering these acts in the first part of the article, the author notices both their imperfection and an obvious merit which is to prevent all sorts of abuse and to arrest corruption in public service. The article focuses on the performance of the Bureau in the Netherlands which is to provide ethics and conscientiousness among bureaucrats in public management. The Bureau was set up within the Home Affairs Ministry in 2006 to help public offices implement its ethics and conscientiousness strategies. This experience of the Netherlands is of great concern as it shows the way of realizing the statute norm on ethics for bureaucrats.

Public management scholars often claim that agency competition provides an effective institutional check on monopoly authority, and hence, leads to improvement of administrative performance in public sector agencies. This logic was central for creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in 975 to challenge the policy information provided by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). We challenge this conventional wisdom by demonstrating that CBO has failed to enhance the quality of U.S. fiscal policy analysis on its own terms; nor has it spurred improvements in OMB’s performance. Our empirical results indicate that the quality of OMB’s fiscal projections has often deteriorated since the establishment of CBO as a rival bureau. We also show that both public and private information is being shared by these agencies to produce a similar caliber of task outputs. The broader implications of our study indicate that although politicians face incentives to employ agency competition in governmental settings, this type of bureaucratic strategy does not necessarily enhance the quality of administrative performance.

The paper applies approaches of the New Institutional Economics to the issue of attracting experts to implementation of public administration functions. Classification of expert knowledge by source and field of application is proposed. Characteristics of different parties to the transactions are described, and approaches are suggested to address the problem of credible commitments of the parties to the transactions concerning expert knowledge, in view of key structural alternatives of governance mechanisms. Several issues to be addressed in future research have been stated.

The transformation of the system of training of the personnel of state and municipal management under conditions of administrative reform in Russia is considered in the article, the conclusion about an opportunity of using principles of the public management in the corporate sector, transfer of the certain part of state functions on the outsourcing is proved.