Cut-Back Management

25-27 April 2013

Next date: 10-12 April 2014

The huge increase of public debt due to the financial and economic crisis, as well as the tightening of fiscal rules in several countries, necessitate severe cuts in public spending during the next decades. Proportionally they exceed cuts that had to be managed during previous economic slumps. This is a huge challenge confronting public officials on the political level as well as within public administrations.

The course will focus on adequate approaches of how to manage this multi-year retrenchment. It will critically analyze past practice of continuing proportional cuts as well as new approaches. Good, or at least encouraging, international practice in the public as well as in the private sector will be analysed. New fiscal and budgetary rules will most likely be accompanied by a stronger role of departments within ministries and in general of decentralized units in questioning the effectiveness and efficiency of existing expenditure and identifying posteriorities. It will be their task to cut running programmes in order to be able to come up to new areas of urgent additional public expenditure. This will increase the responsibilities of a much larger group of public officials to simultaneously manage not only their programmes but also their budgets. Understanding and applying adequate approaches and instruments for cutting public expenditure will turn into an essential qualification no longer confined, as in the past, to a few experts in the finance unit of each public organisation.

You can also choose this course as part of the Certificate in Public Financial Management and Methods or the Certificate in Public Sector Modernisation.

Convenor