The Quality of Bureaucracy and Public Sector Performance : A Comparative Study in South-Eastern Europe

The interaction between the degree of administrative rationalization, ratios of economic growth and public sector performance represents a research field yet insufficient approached, at least for the South-Eastern European states. It presupposes essentially to determine the economic impact of the quality of bureaucracy in national administrations, whose structures, through administrative convergence and dynamics become more or less similar to Weberian administrative structures. The field literature at the end of 20th century has developed comprehensive studies on that topic, analysing the situation in over 35 states all over the world. The South-Eastern European states were not comprised in the mentioned studies. In this context, the paper aims to carry out a comparative theoretical and empirical research for some South-Eastern European states, especially in the Balkans, in view to determine the correlation between the quality of bureaucracy, economic growth and governance performance. The investigation method consists in the “analysis of economic bureaucracy,” whose content is based on Weber’s principles of administrative rationalization, adapted to the research objectives of the paper and grouped in “competitive salaries, internal promotion and career stability, and meritocratic recruitment” (Rauch and Evans, 1999). The sociological investigation was developed in four South-Eastern European states: Romania, Greece, Bulgaria and Croatia on a sample of 125 stakeholders, determined on basis of rigorous representativeness criteria at central government level for each above-mentioned state. The empirical data are obtained in the framework of Jean Monnet project “South-Eastern European developments on the administrative convergence and enlargement of the European Administrative Space in Balkan states.“