Abstract

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

JEL Classification: H11; O23.