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The ongoing debate among economists around the world is whether the public sector should be subject to the same pay cuts as the private sector in order to keep national accounts in check and to prevent states from going bankrupt.
The issue is whether in Cyprus we regard our civil service to be “essential” as they are not tied to any productivity or efficiency measures whatsoever.
When the public sector share of GNP exceeds 50%, then we are on the verge of embracing socialism and abandoning the free market economy that this government was happy with maintaining. This will only happen by bloating the civil service more than it deserves.
More civil servants (Charilaos Stavrakis has been told to hire 1,200) means more of a political ‘need’ and less of an economic ‘want’ that could result in obscure unproductive job positions and vague job descriptions, simply to satisfy the ruling party’s desire to give more people cushy jobs and taxpayer-sponsored pensions.
It would have been better to reassign civil servants from underutilised departments to those that require more human resources, while the government should not be duped into making contractual workers full-time civil servants, as some unions are pressing for.
Public services in the rest of the EU and highly developed economies have introduced budget cuts, freezing pay and bonuses for high-ranking civil servants.
Even regional police forces in the U.K., that have budgetary autonomy, have been told to slash costs and produce more with less. However, as with everywhere else, police are entitled to early retirement as their employment circumstances are far different to others.
Which brings us to the bureaucrats at government ministries and the spoilt ‘elite’ that rule the teachers’ unions, who cannot justify the high salaries they earn nowadays, no matter how hard they try. Perhaps, that was the core of the argument about the University’s acceptance of students based on foreign entrance exams, an insignificant issue that was blown out of proportion for reasons still unknown today.
At a time when other governments are cutting back on excessive expenses (overtime pay, consumables, transport, etc.), we should be looking at improving the quality of life of all citizens by investing more on health and on education that will produce the future generations to help us become more productive and on proper infrastructure projects that will ultimately improve efficiencies at all levels to help make Cyprus more competitive.
