Volume 4, Issue 1, February 2014, 5-25 International Review of Social Research Quality of Government and Decentralization in Romania NTERNATIONAL REVIEW of SOCIAL RESEARCH I IRSR Introduction Romania ranks last in Europe in terms of government effciency (Figure 1). This position is given by the value of an indicator, often used in World Bank assessments, that takes into account the capacity of central and local government, the characteristics of the regulatory system, its impartiality and the quality of public services provided. Compared to other European countries, especially in Eastern Europe, it is found that the value of this indicator has not changed substantially in the last 10 years, Romania occupying constantly the last place (Figure 2). Since 2000, the issues of Abstract: The article explores the effects of the decentralization process in Romania as part of the public administration reform, using a set of fnancial indicators revealing the territorial distribution of the capacity of local public administration to provide public services. These indicators are then correlated with quality of government and government effectiveness indexes at national level. As a result, the analysis refects a territorial variation of fnancial independence of administrative units that can be explained by assuming the differences in the institutional set-up of different communities at local level. These results were used further to formulate a perspective on the decentralization process in Romania based on the assumption of non-homogeneity of socio-economic development of different regions in Romania. Keywords: decentralization, quality of government, public services, public administration reform. Florin BONDAR • Ph. D. in Political Science Agora Est Consulting © University of Bucharest, February 2014 • e-mail: forin.bondar@agoraest.ro. Florin Bondar received his BA degree in Political Philosophy and MA degree in Public Policy from the University of Bucharest, and his PhD in Political Science from the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (NUPSPA). Florin Bondar has a large experience both as a practitioner and as an academic in the feld of Public Policy. As a practitioner, he worked at the General Secretariat of the Romanian Government, where he designed policy formulation procedures and an institutional framework for policy development. He is the co-author of the frst set of procedures for policy formulation at central level of the Romanian public administration (i.e. Regulatory Impact Assessment). Furthermore, Florin Bondar has an international experience as a consultant, being involved in several OECD/SIGMA missions for central public administration in Romania and Serbia. As an academic, Florin Bondar has lectured MA level courses at NUPSPA and has made several study visits and partaken to workshops within the feld of Public Policy organized by University of Birmingham and University of Manchester. Since 2009, Florin Bondar has been working as a consultant for public administration entities at Agora Est Consulting. DOI: 10.1515/irsr-2014-0002