public management reform? ” is answered in three ways. First, governments need to keep up with society in terms of responsiveness and better, faster and more services. Second, trust in government needs to be re-established. A third reason is that govern-ment’s role is changing under new pressures including the loss of the government monopoly, greater competition, the opening-up of societies and international struc-tures. However, for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the starting positions, the challenges, the capacity to change, and the initial objectives were quite different from most of the Western European countries, except for, e.g., Portugal or Spain. (OECD 2005). In a first part, this essay will cover spans of public-sector reform which may be narrow or broad. In a second part, trajectories of reform, which are not linear but progressing in a corrective way, will be discussed. In a third and final part, remaining issues of reform practice and study are discussed. 1. Spans of public sector reform In Western Europe, there was a relatively common problem analysis. Two main problems coincided: First, there was a macro-economic problem of too big a propor-tion of government in the gross domestic product (GDP), of significant deficits, and of a perceived lack of public-sector performance contributing to the GDP. Second, there was a drop of trust and legitimacy in public institutions, including politicians. The macro-economic shifts (from ‘problem ’ to ‘solution’) could be operationa-lised as follows from the ‘economic ’ point of view: The proportion of the public sector in the GDP decreases; there are countries with stable patterns of decrease, others have more fluctuating decreases. Government net lending is an indicator of the yearly deficit. Of course, the European Union’s Maastricht criterion of a maximum of 3 % deficit had a significant impact on reform policies within the European Union. In general, there was a downward trend. In some countries, this deficit turned into a surplus; the recent (financial) crises are reversing this pattern again.
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