Summary:

As the study of administrative reform has progressed over the past decades, worthy descriptive studies of those changes have accumulated across a number of countries. This volume seeks to push the analysis beyond that first generation of research, focussing on "paradoxes" or unintended effects of those reform efforts. It, therefore, does not try to provide a detailed description of administrative change in the fourteen systems considered, but to look selectively at those changes from a "paradox perspective", i.e. highlighting apparently surprising or unintended aspects of administrative reform.
The administrative systems systematically discussed here include the main advanced, industrial democracies, but also transitional and developing countries - such as the People's Republic of China and the former socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the European Union is analysed as a case of an administrative system being constructed from those existing within its constituent parts.