Editorial Essay: Restructuring Public Organizations in Response to Global Economic and

Abstract

This essay is intended to provide information that elected officials, public managers and others need to understand and to better assess alternative methods for improving the management of economic and fiscal stress through restructuring. Analysis of restructuring may be segmented into a variety of sub-topic areas including the causes of economic and fiscal stress, methods for improved management of restructuring, issues and dilemmas faced by public officials and managers attempting to manage restructuring, The range of non-mutually exclusive approaches to management of restructuring includes (a) doing nothing, likely to work only for a short time if economic and fiscal stress persists, (b) increasing revenues through a variety of means including borrowing while reducing expenditures, (c) increasing employee and organizational productivity and employing a set of more innovative responses that are productivityrelated. This essay addresses all of the issue areas indicated above in the context of the ongoing global condition of economic stress. In terms of the immediacy of the issues addressed in this essay, at the time of this writing the fiscal crisis in Greece was most prominent in the news, and a key question arose whether a bailout of Greece and perhaps other financially weakened European nations, if needed, would or should rely on traditional entities such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or whether a European Monetary Fund should be established. The motivation to resolve the fiscal crisis in Greece was driven by the potential impact of government bankruptcy on the value of the Euro, the common currency of the European Union.