Written by,
Goran Jovetić, Secretary of State in the Ministry of Public Administration
Over the last four years, since the establishment of the Ministry of Public Administration in 2016, Montenegro has managed to go through some tough times in the public administration reform and to join the European highway. That journey wasn’t easy or pleasant, as expected, there were many challenges. Reform of public administration of the reform of the state itself.
The complexity of the process is reflected in the fact that all activities that are implemented within that process must have direct benefits for citizens and economy. For these reasons, public administration has become one of the three crucial pillars in the EU enlargement process. The objective is to provide full implementation of EU law and ensure equal treatment of all citizens. In economic terms, we must have administration that will save citizens’ resources. Citizens expect from this administration to offer more, services of better quality, with as little consumption of time and money as possible.
Therefore, the priority of work was aimed at the improvement of the reform process and achievement of the general reform objective envisaged by the Strategy of the Public Administration Reform 2016-2020 – creating efficient and service-oriented administration characterized by enhanced trust of citizens and economy in its work. Special segment of this challenging road is optimization of public administration. In order to understand it, we must know first what it is. The verb “to optimize” means to improve, make something better, more cost-effective. That’s why optimization was in function of reduction of the share of expenses for gross salaries in GDP and increase in the efficiency of the efficiency of public administration as service of economy and citizens.
Finally, it should contribute to creating optimal public administration and administrative structures to respond to citizens’ needs in a more efficient way. The situation was really challenging and we never tried to make it look like it wasn’t. It was particularly hard to create measures to contribute to the realization of objectives.
We were ready, but was the system ready? It was, as institutions responded positively to the measures adopted by the Government. The plan contains a set of short-term and middle-term measures at both central and local level.
Reports and the analysis have shown that optimization has positive effects. Owing to the adopted principle, employment in public administration as all levels has been slowed down.
REDUCTION
Reduction of the employees in the public sector in the structure of total number of employees in Montenegro is corroborated by the data from the Analysis of effects of the Optimization plan, which shows that employment in public administration accounted for 26,8% of total employment, which is by 1,4% less than in December 2017.
Absolute moratorium on employment hasn’t been introduced through the optimization process. In order to successfully respond to the challenges of the European integration and provide smooth functioning of the public sector authorities, it is possible to form employment relationship for a determined or undetermined period of time. As you can note, we wanted to make sure that optimization doesn’t have negative impact on the necessity to strengthen administrative capacities in the public sector.
As far as impact on the budget is concerned, for example in 2018, budget expenses for gross salaries have been reduced to around 10% of GDP. What stands behind these figures is effort and commitment of the entire system!
