Strategy and structure for a new State

One of the major reforms the Cardoso administration is committed is the administrative.The basic proposal is to change Brazilian public administration from a bureaucraticadministration to a managerial one. The emergence, in the nineteenth century, of abureaucratic public administration replacing the patrimonialist forms of administering thestate represented a great progress. But it did not make sense anymore when the state hadadded to its role providing public education, public health, public culture, social security,science and technology incentives, infrastructure investments, environment protection. Themanagerial public administration emerged as an answer to the crisis of the state, as a formof coping with the fiscal crisis, as a strategy of making the administration of the huge servicesthe state took on less expensive and more efficient, as well as a device to protect thepublic patrimony against rent-seeking or sheer corruption. The new public administration isoutcome and citizen oriented; it assumes that politicians and civil servants are entitled to alimited degree of trust; it uses as strategy decentralization and the incentive to creativity andinnovation; it controls public managers through the device of management contracts. JEL Classification: H11; O23.