18 effectively."' They generally ensure a high level of system coordination, providing policy makers and planners with the necessa degree of information and control both to stabilize public eanployment during fiscal crises and to design manpower policies for the longer term.

Centralized models usually operate tight monitoring systems through which nationally determined staffing levels are enforced via a coordinated effort of the central personnel authority and the Finance Ministry. Relying heavily on staff audits or inspection techniques, governments in Japan, the Netherlands, France, Singapore and Korea have all sought to impose government-wide Ceilings on staffing levels and to utilize forward planning to contain public employment. Japan's cenetally controlled system, for instance, has since the late 1960s facilitated government staff reductions. Working in concert, the Management Coordination Agency enforces ministerial employment ceilings mandated by law, while the National Personnel Authority adjusts civil serice recruitment targets. Since 1968, these ceilings have gradually been lowered, enabling the Japanese to move beyond personnel stabilization to net reductions."' A centralized model has also proven highly useful in Singapore's manpower control program. The Ministry of Finance's Budget Division sets staffing levels in its manpower plan, and ministries must obtain the Budget Division's approval to add staff. This enforces the government's zero-growth policy (begun in 1988), with the Budget Division and the Public Service Commission working in concert to control recruitment. To support central efforts, the capacity to plan and monitor staffing levels has also been developed at the ministerial level. With training provided centrally in staff review techniques by the Management Services Department and the Auditor General's Office, all public agencies carry out comprehensive programs of manpower scrutinies to identify superfluous functions and staff.

Other highly centralized systems include Korea and France. Through tight control of department manpower levels, regulation of recruitment and periodic staff inspections, Korea has kept public employment constant since 1980 at four percent of the fabor force. France maintains establishment control through the budget, carefully setting the number of officials in each salary scale and establishing fixed percentages for the number of officials who can be promoted from one salary scale to another. The key mechanism to adjust civil service numbers is recruitment restraint.

Having achieved these successes, some centralized systems of manpower control are now relaxing their reins a bit, ceding limited discretion over staffing levels to departments and line managers in the interest of greater flexibility. In Canada, for example, the Treasury Board Secretariat allocates person-years to departments and only controls the number of senior managers. Departments and agencies have gotten increased autonomy in distributing person-years among different levels of staff, and they can make special appointments amounting to 10% of their base complement of positions.

I<sup>8</sup> Data which would provide definitive **bases** for comparison of different approaches to establishment managemcnt are not easy to come by. **Ile** goal of any system should be to ensure adequate stability and forward planning of wappropriate,f **--** i.e. neither too high nor too low - staffing levels in order to avert emergency retrenchment programs. Sufficient time series on civil service numbers **with** reasonable comparability **across** countries (i.e. with consistent definitions of what constitutes the civil service) are not available,however, and thus comparative indices of stable establishment management are difficult to construct.

> 19!n Japan, multi-year forecasting **Is** facilitated by the hign staff retention rate and the lifetime nature of public employment.