Christopher Pollitt
CUTBACKS AND PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM: LET’S NOT KID OURSELVES
Introduction
Most EU countries currently have to make cutbacks in public expenditure. In some – Greece, Ireland, the UK – these cuts are unprecedentedly deep. In others – such as Denmark and Finland – they are large but not quite so out of scale with the past. The UK is having a particularly bad time because its economy houses a bloated financial services sector and a bloated property market – the two sectors which have sourced the global crisis. Finland, as a contrasting example, has a much smaller financial services sector and, what’s more, banking regulation was reformed after a bank crisis in the 1990s, in a way that the New Labour and Coalition administrations in the UK – for all their endless speeches on the subject - have so far signally failed to achieve. All EU countries have been navigating through the same storm, but they are by no means all in the same boat. The effects of the cuts are already unpopular in the countries which are the hardest-hit, and will become more so as their impacts become more visible and concrete. Continue reading
