Many countries are still struggling to adapt to the broad and unexpected effects of modernization initiatives. As changes take shape, governments are challenged to explore new reforms. The public sector is now characterized by profound transformation across the globe, with ramifications that are yet to be interpreted. To convert this transformation into an ongoing state of improvement, policymakers and civil service leaders must learn to implement and evaluate change. This book is an important contribution to that end.

"Reforming the Public Sector" presents comparative perspectives of government reform and innovation, discussing three decades of reform in public sector strategic management across nations. The contributors examine specific reform-related issues including the uses and abuses of public sector transparency, the "Audit Explosion," and the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction in Europe.

This volume will greatly aid practitioners and policymakers to better understand the principles underpinning ongoing reforms in the public sector. Giovanni Tria, Giovanni Valotti, and their cohorts offer a scientific understanding of the main issues at stake in this arduous process. They place the approach to public administration reform in a broad international context and identify a road map for public management.

Contributors include: Michael Barzelay, Nicola Bell?, Andrea Bonomi Savignon, Geert Bouckaert, Luca Brusati, Paola Cantarelli, Denita Cepiku, Francesco Cerase, Luigi Corvo, Maria Cucciniello, Isabell Egger-Peitler, Paolo Fedele, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Mario Ianniello, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, Irvine Lapsley, Peter Leisink, Mariannunziata Liguori, Renate Meyer, Greta Nasi, James L. Perry, Christopher Pollitt, Adrian Ritz, Raffaella Saporito, MariaFrancesca Sicilia, Ileana Steccolini, Bram Steijn, Wouter Vandenabeele, and Montgomery Van Wart.

The economics of the service sector has recently attracted a large attention. At a macroeconomic level, the discussion has been focused on the issues concerning the relationship between the expansion of the service industry and the potential for a stable and sustained growth. Slow productivity growth, due to the largely non tradable nature of the output, lack of competition due either to regulations or to barriers to entry are among the "bads" sometimes associated with a "service led" growth. On the other hand new working places are created in the service industries at a rate much higher than in the industrial ones. Is a lower rate of technological change and the continuing of inflationary tensions the price to pay for a sustained expansion of employment in the service sector? These are in a nutshell the questions that led CElS (Centre for International Studies on Economic Growth - University of Rome "Tor Vergata") to organize the International Seminar on "The Service Sector: Productivity and Growth" held in Rome in May 1993, whose revised proceedings are published in this volume. The economists and academicians invited to the conference have faced the issues mentioned above from different perspectives, but they concentrated especially on the problems relative to growth and productivity.