The Impact of Decentralization on the Efficiency of Municipal Services. Case study

The decentralization process represents an important component of the administrative reform, which allows an ample manifestation of the local initiative, but which, in the context of the great phenomena such as globalization, European integration, regionalization, proves to be insufficient, due to the increased competitiveness in different important economic sectors, such as education, health, transport, utility supply public services, the emerging needs, interests and necessities becoming increasingly difficult to be directly solved by the local administrations. At present, there is no national or local model of efficient administration, the optimum decentralization or deconcentration limits being difficult to establish in the public sector; still, the experiences of different states in the matter vary from models falling into the optimum parameters (states in western Europe),to classical semi-failure examples (Argentina, Brazil).On public services decentralization policy there is, in general, a vast literature, but insufficient analyses of the impact of local public services reorganizing on their efficiency and performance. In this sense, starting from the hypothesis that decentralization determined significant differences at the level of organizing, functioning and objectives of the local administrations and its public services in different states, the paper presents a nonexhaustive comparative analysis of the process of decentralization and deconcentration of these services, and at the level of the Romanian local administrative space, a case study regarding the impact of decentralization on the increased efficiency of a municipal public service (Bucharest Thermal Energy Distribution Autonomous Regie – in original, Regia Autonomã de Distribu?ie a Energiei Termice Bucure?ti - RADET).