Training Public Administrators Around the World

Among the most intractable problems in the public sector is how to train effective administrators. Nagel and the contributors to this wide-ranging investigation show how worldwide the training problem is, and how critical is the need to solve it. Included here are discussions of, among other issues, how to motivate, reward, promote, and sanction new and experienced hires, and also how to deal with them fairly and productively in other ways. They explore ways to provide training courses in colleges, government agencies, and private sector training facilities, how to teach specific subjects, such as financial administration (including taxation, spending, budgeting), and how to develop and implement public policies that are effective, efficient, and equitable.

Interdisciplinary as well as cross-national, the book provides viewpoints from both academics and practitioners -- people from political science, public administration, public policy and related disciplines. It also offers a combination of liberal and conservative ideological viewpoints, and reaches into Africa, Asia, East and West Europe, Latin America and North America for its viewpoints. Among the book’s features are its stress on the importance of well-trained public administrators, its coverage of the controversial aspects of public administration training, and its success at integrating the substance of public policy with administrative procedures. The result is a major source of information for public administrators and policy makers already in government service and for students in academic programs preparing them for it.

STUART S. NAGEL is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is also Secretary-Treasurer and Publications Coordinator of the Policy Studies Organization and coordinator of the Dirksen-Stevenson Institute and the MKM Research Center, also at Urbana-Champaign. A prolific writer and editor, he lists among his more recent Quorum books Super Optimum Solutions and Win-Win Policy (1997), Legal Scholarship, Microcomputers, and Super-Optimizing Decision-Making (1993), and Computer-Aided Decision Analysis (1993).