Issue 2019 no5 contents:

Over-politicization co-exists in the Croatian public administration with legalism, formalism and red tape. Low reform, innovation and initiative capacities are among the results of such an administrative model. Croatia has a relatively big and strong but ineffcient public administration. Internal bureaucratic resistance to modernization is observable. Foreign actors play a moderate role in administrative reform. The European Union has exerted the strongest influence on modernization on the basis of conditionality policy, insistence on the administrative capacity building, and the European Semester procedure. E-government policy, transparency, and strategic planning are the reform areas with the above-average reform results.

This paper looks at how culture affects the reform process and how cultural factors play an important role in clarifying administration models. Culture is considered as an important variable that interacts differently from one situation to another and from one place to another, therefore, Anglo-Saxon administrations have experienced several phases and many transformations (public administration, new public administration). Due to many obstacles (economics squeeze, the poor performance), both PA and the NPM have failed to capture the delivery and management of public services in the twenty-first century, which has created momentum for actors to look for efficient public services delivery by creating a more integrated public sector. New public governance (NPG) appeared in the literature as a new model looking towards a more integrated public service, combining several players (private sectors, civil society) working on delivering service in the best possible manner. As a result, Anglo-Saxons countries have proceeded many reforms. The joining-up-government strategy is considered as the latest manifestation of NPG after the negative effects of NPM. Research on Joining up Government (JUG) has a long tradition. It has been used for many years in the field of public administration and was widely welcomed in the mid-1990s in numerous Anglo-Saxon countries as a response to the failure of new public management in the public sector, which was at that time far from being well-coordinated. Consequently, the JUG strategies have been proposed to redress this failure, and to that end, several actors play significant roles in the success of these strategies. But, in return, there is a necessity for a number of cultural arrangements between these players. However, these arrangements are dependent on the dialectic of cultural values that are adopted by those society nations. Geert Hofstede, like many researchers in the cross-culture field, tried to adopt cultural dimensions to explain the differences between the many nations that carry diff erent cultural values. From this standpoint, this paper triesto explain JUG in Anglo-Saxon countries by using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions.

This study aims to provide an overview of the literature on network research that developed in public administration studies over a period of ten years (2007–2016). Besides this, it also observes whether a consensus on the network concept was reached among scholars during this time period. The differences in approaches and perspectives used by public administration scholars in understanding networks each have their own implications on the heterogeneity of network research. Such differences, hence, influence the way they define networks. The rise in the amount of research and differences in the use of the “term” network indicates that clarity in the network concept has yet to be reached. The contribution of this study is based on the fact that the field of public administration needs to be more aware of the network literature in other disciplines and to employ this research to advance the understanding of network issues in the public sector context.

Defined in the simplest and the most comprehensive framework, decision-making is the process of choosing between alternatives, and it is affected by various factors. Ethics, which is regarded as one of the signifi cant elements among these factors, influences the decision-making process at organisational and individual levels. The subjects of ethics and ethical decision-making are becoming highly crucial in public policy making and implementation processes. Moreover, topics such as the circumstances that have an impact on the decisions of public administrators, and the ethical codes or institutions that help public administrators are major research areas in recent public administration literature.
It is within this framework that this paper analyses the efforts to create an ethical policy, which will contribute to the ethical decision-making process of the public administrators in Turkey in terms of legislation, institutional dimension and ethical codes. This study reveals that even though Turkey has taken promising steps to generate an ethical system for public administration and service, there are still essential points to be reassessed regarding the expected transformation in combating corruption and unethical behaviours.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between organizational cultural characteristics, knowledge transfer and the role of certain identified organizational cultural aspects in the execution of knowledge transfer in Chinese Multinational Companies involved in CPEC.
A quantitative research plan was followed. A questionnaire was used to collect the desired data. For this study we identified six factors, including trust among colleagues, communication between organizational staff, information systems, formation of the reward system, and structure of the organization which plays an important and defining role in the interaction between staff members and in providing possibilities to sever barriers to knowledge transfer.
A total of 27 organizations involved in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are identified. The intended hypothesis was tested by using PLS-SEM, and our research finding indicates that all the variables except information systems did not show positive relationships.
The study proposed that multinational organizations must understand the critical role of organizational culture and interaction among team members in promoting, sharing, and spreading knowledge to perform well and achieve organizational success thereafter.
This study is anticipated to help Chinese MNCs in Pakistan to understand the different cultural characteristics because according to previous studies many multinational companies overlook the impact of culture factors on the sharing of knowledge, while bearing in mind that in the literature there is no specific study regarding Chinese MNCs involved in CPEC. The conclusion of this study will help out knowledge executives charged with the drawing of flexible knowledge management systems.

A qualitative positive shift in regional development largely depends on human resources that create value and transform other development factors. A significant part of the emerging regional disparities in individual national economies also causes disparities in regional development at the achieved level of employment and unemployment. One of the significant quantifiable negative impacts on the level of regional development is the decline in gross domestic product as a key indicator of the economic progress of the country. The unimportant impact of the growth of unemployment is the decrease in economic growth both in the short and long term. Due to the fact that one of the goals of public administration organisations is to ensure the continuous positive economic and social development of the administered territory, the problem of identifying the dominant development trends in the labor market from the legislative and economic point of view can be considered highly topical. The main focus of the study is to analyze selected economic and legislative aspects of unemployment through the selected instruments of employment policy in the labor market and in the context of changes in gross domestic product. We used quantitative data characterizing the labor market and the economic development of the regions as well as the valid legislative norms as part of the desk- based analysis. To prove the dependence of the unemployment rate on real growth and vice versa, we used the theory of Okun´s law. Applying Eurostat data, we analyzed labour markets in the Czech and Slovak Republic. The labour market situation is examined in the context of the development of selected labor market indicators from 28-member states of the EU, collected from 2007–2016. The calculated regression model shows that the Czech Republic unemployment rate is more dependent on variation in real GDP growth rate than the Slovak one. The authors are worried that on the other hand, the trend of increasing the number of people of productive age plus the extension of the retirement age can act as a problem in terms of long-term unemployment and the imbalance on the labour market. The question of regularly increasing retirement (and its possible cessation) is a current problem in the Slovak Republic and also in the Czech Republic. And in this context, it could be also said that the current employment policy implemented in both countries does not satisfactorily reflects the merits of addressing the issues of unemployment.

The present study examines the level of job satisfaction among municipal employees in Greece, the relation between overall satisfaction and satisfaction that is related with job objective, working conditions, salary, kind of service, collaboration and development prospects, as well as possible repercussions of the economic crisis on it. The data comes from a survey carried out in 2017 on a sample of 196 employees. The survey questionnaire is based on the scales for measuring satisfaction from Spector’s “Job Satisfaction Survey”.
A basic conclusion of the survey is that the overall satisfaction of employees is mediocre, this picture, though, not having been affected substantially by the implications of the economic crisis. However, it has been found that the study determined those specific satisfaction aspects, namely the department where employees serve and the administrative skills of the heads of the departments, that seem to have positive influence on the generally satisfi ed employees. The examination of certain aspects of partial job satisfaction aims at improving public management, mainly on the basis of intrinsic rewards, in times of economic instability.

The article takes a close look at the very current subject of online communication using modern and popular channels of interaction that can help build «small motherlands», particularly among young web2 users. Th e author focuses on the rarely addressed topic of using ICT in rural and urban-rural gminas3 to deal with the environment of local government, especially with the generation of «digital natives», the countryside «generation Y». In the article the communication preference of the named generations is indicated and the results of the tests for official services of gminas and profiles carried out by local authorities in the popular social networking site are presented. The author compares data obtained in different periods of research, which allows for the determination of trends in the use of tools of communication of the rural and urban-rural offices with young people.

Infrastructure and health are considered to be crucial investments in many countries in order to sustain their economic growth, including Indonesia. Furthermore, after decentralization in 2001, Indonesian local governments have had the authority to expand both sectors in order to support the acceleration of national economic growth. However, policymakers in the regions are often confronted with many factors in the investment decision-making process, one of which is budget constraints. Therefore, this study aims to prioritize policy in the healthcare infrastructure sector determined by local government administrators in West Java province. A benefit-cost approach was used as an element for characterizing the positive and negative impacts (benefit for positive impact, and cost for negative impact) by period and categories to set the projects’ prioritization which was measured by Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The result shows that the majority of policy makers in the regions provide an assessment with the highest cost-benefit ratio for public health enhancement compared with other alternatives. This means that accessibility to primary healthcare facilities is still the main focus for prioritization and local government administrators prefer to focus on policy where the impact is to increase the health enhancement through expanding coverage of primary health facilities in the sub-district areas. As a policy recommendation, AHP was demonstrated for the effectiveness in the decision-making process for public budgeting, especially in terms of infrastructure investment.