Federal Credit Reform

The Congress has now enacted, and the president has signed, legislation requiring credit reform accounting in the 1992 budget. This article summarizes the state of federal budgeting for credit activities, covering (1) where we are now with regard to budgeting for ciedit, (2) how we got where we are, (3) the major weaknesses of the older approaches and why credit reform is important, and (4) the fundamental elements of the recently enacted credit reform legislation.     

Reforming Credit Reform

The Federal Credit Reform Act (FCRA) improved the treatment of credit in the federal budget, but failed to make the budget cost of credit and noncredit programs fully comparable. Inconsistencies and downwardly biased credit costs arise from the restriction under FCRA that cash flows be discounted at Treasury rates, and from the omission of certain administrative costs. We describe the shortcomings of FCRA and policy distortions that may occur, and propose modifications to the Act that would more closely align budget costs of credit and noncredit programs.     

Public Sector Reform

Reform is never far from the centre of public administration practice and scholarship. In this article Doug McTaggart, the chairman of the Queensland Public Service Commission, and Janine O'Flynn, from the University of Melbourne, explore the challenges of reform and the state of play. McTaggart, who was a commissioner on the Queensland Commission of Audit, sets out the case that business as usual will no longer suffice given the range of challenges faced by governments. He sets out to explain how we ended up in our current state and what needs to happen to repair it, drawing on deep experience in the practice of reform. O'Flynn positions reform as one of the central questions in public administration and management and makes the case for rethinking reform conceptually to drive change in practice. In doing so she points to our weaknesses in determining whether reform fails or succeeds and makes the case that, until we rethink reform, business as usual might be all we end up with. McTaggart and O'Flynn bring together the expertise of practice and academia to bring new insights in this persistent challenge of public administration, and raise a series of questions for debate.     

Civil Service Reform

Books reviewed:
Stephen E. Condrey and Robert Maranto (eds.), Radical Reform of the CivilService
James P. Pfiffner and Douglas A. Brook (eds.), The Future of Merit: Twenty Years after the Civil Service Reform Act
A.T. Rafiqur Rahman, Reforming the Civil Service for Government Performance: A Partnership Perspective     

Performance Management and Public Sector Reform: The Norwegian Hospital Reform

This article addresses the development of new performance management systems related to public sector reforms. One such system is Management by Objectives and Results (MBOR), based on an official OECD model. Such a system tries to establish unambiguous goals, objectivity, and incentive elements into often traditionally trust-based systems embedded in a complex political-administrative context. To analyze such performance management systems and how they work in practice, we focus on a recent reform of the hospital structure in Norway. Using a broad institutional perspective, we argue that the MBOR-system in Norway is a mixed and complex system encompassing different kinds of logic. These include instrumental elements from the new performance management systems combined with ad hoc preventive efforts by the political leadership, the influence of cultural constraints, elements of rather inappropriate self-interested action, and pressure from the environment. The study reveals that the hospital reform in Norway in practice can be seen as an integrated model, combining informal trust-based approaches and formal performance management measures. It also shows that negative side effects and dysfunctions might occur.     

The Reform Bubble Bursts

Books reviewed in this article:
Columbia Accident Investigation Board, Report, Volume One     

Education Reform California Style

Education reform was a major issue in California during the1983 legislative session. As a legislative issue, it was resolvedin July when Governor George Deukmejian signed into law an educationreform bill that increased spending by $800 million and madea number of important changes in the state's education code.The differences between the 1982 and 1983 legislative sessionswere stark. In 1982, an election year, despite intense pressureby the education lobby, the state legislature refused to grantnew monies to education. Yet in 1983 the reverse was the case.Now this turnabout came to pass is a case of state politics;national events had little impact on either the direction orthe nature of reforms enacted.     

Research and Welfare Reform

Social science research had an important but limited effect on welfare reform, meaning recent enactments that imposed work requirements on family welfare. Policymakers sometimes ignored findings, but the features of research also limited its influence. Most academics did not accept the conservative goals of reform, many of their predictions proved to be incorrect, and research also lacked sufficient policy content to interest government. These features reflect the recent development of the social sciences. For research to have more influence, it must become more catholic about goals and more realistic, and it must offer more governmental content. Especially, inquiry should rely less on the statistical analysis of databases and more on field observation of how poor communities live and programs operate.     

我国医疗保障制度改革的公平性与效率性探讨

本文主要从公平性与效率性两个方面对我国改革开放以来的医疗保障制度改革进行了探讨。本文认为我国改革开放以来的医疗保障制度改革从总体上看表现为公平性不足,效率性较差。在此基础上,本文就提高我国医疗保障制度改革的公平性与效率性提出一些政策性的建议。