Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira
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Abstract. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century a new, social-liberal and republican state, is replacing the welfare or social-democratic state, while public management replaces bureaucratic public administration. Public management reforms, however, does not aim just at efficiency. Besides the economic, there is a moral and a democratic constraint. And the later has, eventually, precedence over the economic one as long as we may argue in rational terms but the final decision on public policies is political. In this new public management senior civil servants and the agencies they manage are more autonomous and more accountable. Increasingly, services that were directly performed by the state are contracted out with public non-state organizations. They conserve their professional character, but as long as they are supposed to take decisions in decentralized agencies, they are required to have republican approach to civil service.
