Assessing PNDL

This book is about the predictors of getting funds from Romania’s largest State Budget funded program—National Program for Local Development (PNDL). It aims to contribute to an objective assessment of the way State Budget funds from Romania’s largest program are allocated at the level of county councils and municipalities in the urban and rural area.

This book relies on a triangulation of data sources and methods to increase the robustness of findings and conclusions. Findings based on a secondary analysis of open data have been put in the larger settings of the Romanian system of public administration, as a result of the extensive desk review and contextual analysis conducted. The desk research has also identified previous findings on similar topics/ approaches. In addition, open data on PNDL II funding allocations published by the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration have been supplemented with relevant statistical information at locality level from the National Institute of Statistics, as well as local development indexes currently available—for rural localities, technical and building endowment index, as computed in a study by the Economic Studies Academy, index of local human development, as computed by professor Dumitru Sandu, together with various indicators (mainly on own revenues and EU funds) from the database of local budgets execution as published by a different department from the same ministry mentioned above—General Directorate of Public Administration, Directorate for Local Fiscal and Budgetary Policies. Based on the desk review, additional data sources have been integrated into a common database. They refer to data on the political affiliation of mayors’ and President of the County Council from the local elections of 2016 as published by the Central Electoral Office and data on urban and rural municipalities which are part of a Local Action Group. All these quantitative data have been aggregated by the author in a common database at locality level. Furthermore, data from the budgetary allocations of PNDL II have been, on the one hand, integrated into a large database compiled at investment objective level and, on the other hand, aggregated at locality level, as a sum of all contracted investment objectives.

The Romanian public administration system consists of a two-tier local government structure including 3181 municipalities (3180 municipalities plus the municipality of Bucharest, the capital city) and 41 county councils. The set of 3181 municipalities includes 2861 rural municipalities, 217 towns and 103 cities.

This study is about public organisations acting in a complex funding environment. Therefore, we draw on concepts and explanatory models from sociology, public management and public finance. Similar to other social science disciplines, there is also diversity within public administration as a field of study. A recent work on this concludes that nowadays public administration is placed at a crossroads, facing serious challenges between its diverse shades as a ‘vertical’ department in the university hierarchy and a ‘horizontal’ field with various cross-cutting academic organisational structures and boundaries.

At first glance, getting funds for the local community from PNDL II would mean a typical process in which a mayoralty (usually not in partnership for this funding line) drafts a project based on the local needs, submits it to the Ministry and, depending on the selection criteria or procedure, gets the funding. Nevertheless, the funded projects depend on the total limit allocated through State Budget Law, which is sometimes approved after the deadline of receiving the proposals. MPs can also amend this law with specific investment objectives, although in practice, their amendments have not been approved. Furthermore, the proposed investment objective can be approved for funding and included in the corresponding ministerial order issued, but the funding contract between the Ministry and the territorial administrative unit can last longer. In the previous session (PNDL I), a part of the contracts from Maramureş county has not been signed in the year 2014, thus exceeding the provisioned term of 2014. Correspondingly, the sums could not be used in the fiscal year of 2014. In the qualitative research conducted for this study, for the case of PNDL II, one mayor from a rural community mentioned the case of ‘an interrupted communication until the funding contract has been signed’.

This study analysed the first allocations within PNDL II program, with an improved or at least changed formula of allocation, compared to the first part of the program, namely the first phase of the program PNDL I 2013–2020. The contracts analysed have been awarded until May 2018, with most of them allocated in the last months of 2017. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration has granted several other allocations from the same program. The following figure shows the evolution of allocations in the period of 2017–2020, according to the latest data published by the Ministry (presently the Ministry of Public Works, Development and Administration) in February 2020.

By the time this study has been finalised in February-March 2020, the outbreak of COVID-19 in Europe has started. Romania became part of this global crisis.

This book is about predictors of getting funds from Romania’s largest State Budget funded program—the National Program for Local Development (PNDL). It aims to contribute to an objective assessment of the way State Budget funds from Romania’s largest program are allocated at the level of county councils and municipalities in the urban and rural area. It covers allocations of the second phase of program implementation, namely the ‘reformed one’, PNDL II 2017–2020, with a double volume of funds than its previous phase.

To:

Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration

Bd. Libertăţii, no. 16, Latura Nord, sector 5, Bucureşti, postal code 050706

Dear Madam/ Sir,

Through this document, I would like to submit a request in line with Law no. 544/ 2001 on free access to public information requests. I would like to receive in electronic format the following information