Aspen Institute’s Young Leaders Program, Module 3, Day 1
I am attending the Young Leaders Program from Aspen Institute Romania these days. It is the third module out of four that I had the privilege to contract out, as a result of a highly selection process that consisted in an application file and an interview with an international board. The key objectives of Aspen Romania’s Young Leaders Program are to promote and advance progressive leadership within Romanian and European society and to create a national, eventually regional, network of young future leaders based on shared values and common interests. Aspen Romania is part of Aspen Global Network.
The third module is aimed at developing moderation and presentation skills. The first day was dedicated to the economic and financial crisis and here are the solutions that we came up with for Romania, as a result of our debate:
- Stop wasting money on bureaucracy (shrink the state apparatus, lower the taxes).
- Privatize all but the core services (justice, internal security, military, education).
- Encourage competition and entrepreneurship.
- Encourage free rational thinking.
- De-regulate business relations and cancel other imposed restrictions.
- Lack of expertise in the central government is relevant.
- Need clever government intervention.
- Make it easy to do business in Romania, fire people if inefficient, no bribes, promote education.
- The one who oversees the rules should not be a player.
- Promote investment in research and development, keep the brains inside the country.
- Decentralize the public administrations.
- Reduce bureaucracy to make investments.
- Need managers in the public institutions.
- Public managers should be results-oriented.
- Start with the resources (financial, human), accountability of spending public money, give incentives to the areas that bring profit (80% of the national income is made by 2,000 companies that produce profit).
- Government accountability would solve a lot of the issues.
- Reform the fiscal policy.
- Improve the cost of human resources management at government level…we need public managers.
- Identify and promote the profitable sectors of the economy.
- Write projects to get EU funds
