Administrative Simplification in the Context of the Global Economic Crisis. The Case of Romania

The economic crisis has developed new challenges for public institutions in the EU member states. These institutions experience a notable economic pressure on their decisional process. The EU has been boosting the member states to reduce the ‘administrative burden’ of public institutions by promoting measures of institutional and legislative adaptation to the challenges set by the crisis, measures appropriate to the techniques of adaptive public management. The goal of this article is to analyze the administrative simplification processes undertaken as a result of the implementation of adaptive public management in the Romanian pubic administration. The targeted fields of reform analyzed relate to public investments, public expenditure, public procurement, the fiscal policy, the level of beaurocratisation, and the support for business development. Methods of research refer to the analysis of official documents regarding the ‘administrative burden’ and possible solutions for reducing it, as indicated by the EU or member states that succeeded in doing so, as well as the method of data analysis regarding the indicators of improvement of the targeted fields and the results of administrative simplification. The conclusions underline the level of implementation in the Romanian public administration of the action courses promoted by the EU in the direction of reducing the “administrative burden”.