ABSTRACT
The reforms that have been implemented in the public sector over the past several decades have had a very wide range of motivations, and have had an equally wide range of consequences for the public sector for the citizens of the countries in which they are being implemented. In almost any country one can identify, the public sector is now significantly different from that which was to be found several decades ago, and indeed in some cases the public bureaucracy would be hardly recognizable to civil servants who had previously worked in government. The idea of many political leaders has been that the bureaucracy was the problem, not the solution, and that fundamental changes were required.
