03/07/2011
Percival Manglano: “Individuals and businesses being, as they are, but people collaborating on an economic project know better than anyone else what they want to do, where they want to invest, how much they want to save and what they want to buy. Making the State decide for them is a sure formula for ruin”
“Economic crises redouble the importance of the pre-eminence of people over the State. When more than 1.3 million families see that none of its members work, when there are 5 million unemployed, when more than 300 000 businesses have disappeared because of the crisis, and when one out of two Spanish youths are unemployed, as is the current situation in Spain, the State must become an effective and efficient tool in order to deliver the imperative services demanded from it”
“The essence of classic-liberalism is the pre-eminence of the individual over the State”
“Austerity enables the lowering of taxes without abandoning budget stability. A budget stability that the regional government of Madrid has always achieved, being the sole region that has not needed to devise a consolidation plan. Our efficiency is what enables us to be austere and therefore, to lower taxes, achieve a balance and make companies create wealth and jobs”
“And that efficiency is achieved, mainly, by public-private partnerships. In other words, a splitting-up of work between the Administration and companies so that each one does what it knows best”
“Experience shows that private management under public ownership is cheaper, has better quality and therefore, is more efficient”
“It is essential that the Administrations as a whole are austere and do not spend more that they receive, with or without crisis. In other words, meeting zero deficit”
Mario Garcés: “Reforming the public sector is not a necessity but a matter of principles, we cannot make more public companies because it would ruin us as a country”
“The Government’s mistake has been to create an administrative mesh during the times of economic growth believing that it would be tightened in times of crises”
“The problem is not in the administration itself, but in recruiting public workers through the creation of multiple foundations, inefficient and excessively subsidised, and without audits controlling them. The obsession to create inefficient public bodies is now also a feature of Spanish self-governed regions”
“We don’t exactly know how many public employees there are in Spain, we calculate that we are within the OECD’s average (1 out of every 18 citizens). In order to calculate the ideal number we should reconsider two issues, the telematisation of public services and the excessive over-protection of public workers in our country”
Julio Gómez-Pomar: “The tools for the effective running of public administrations are fixing an expenditure ceiling (for both the State and the self-governed regions) and monitoring policies”
“The development of regional governments and the accession to the EU delayed our introduction into a public management focused on citizens and efficiency. The first government of the PP had a great impact on economic activity and on reducing the public administration. This will be the challenge of the next Spanish government”
“In order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of self-governed regions, the latter must assess their public policies identifying duplicities, defining capacities and returning to the principles that dictate a healthy management of services”
“There are two important issues when defining public policies: identifying the necessities of a society, such as employment policies, and making the administration succeed in transforming the necessities of citizens into specific aims establishing measurement systems”
“The policy assessment process requires two things: achieving a greater transparency and the real participation of citizens”
Antonio Núñez: “The world is changing at top speed and therefore so is the role of the State and of civil society. For that reason, we must implement the necessary reforms that will ease our adaptation to these changes”
“The economic crisis we are going through right now demands that our public management be more efficient. Social demands increasingly require greater public services, while the State coffers are increasingly empty”
“In order to improve our country’s efficiency (50% of GDP is public administration) we must improve the management of our administrations”
“The challenge for the new governments will be to achieve a greater efficiency and austerity. In order to do this, it will be essential to make a comprehensive and thorough assessment of public management, devise a strategic plan for administrations, and recruit executives with expertise”
“A public manager must take into account two things: his or her environment and the capacities he or she will have to develop based on a technical and prudential knowledge and with managing capacities”
“The effectiveness, austerity and professionalization of management will have to become a regular feature in the next months. Good practices examples will have a great social impact and on the competitiveness of our country”