POST-PANDEMIC PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN ROMANIA

At the beginning of 2020, on February 26th, the first cases of SARAS COV-2, on
the Romanian territory were confirmed, this uncertain phenomenon would, radically
change the way of carrying out activities in the field of public administration, this domain
changes significantly after the national security challenge gets active and enters in state
of alert.

In the public administration, several series of changes occur, which produce a new
way of approaching on social and administrative problems, these changes will continue
after the pandemic has slow down. These changes, in the public administration have
become, so well, a part of the system, that they are successfully integrated as useful tools
and preserved.

Firstly, the outbreak of the pandemic formed the principle of limiting the access of
individuals to the public institutions such as: the headquarters of ANAF, the police, the
forestry department, universities and other educational institutions, the headquarters of
ISU or the Direction for taxes and duties and so on. This new principle imposed the
development of the capacity of managing the flow of individuals in public institutions,
by equipping them with special devices for recording and guiding citizens. The existence
of those devices, meant for managing the flow of people, had facilitated the work of
employees and led to their maintenance as a basic way of carrying out activities. At the
same time, public institutions have developed several online platforms through which
they made their services available such as: developing the smart-EDU platform for the
digitization of education in schools, creating the e-Signature platform for signing
documents online, making available on different platforms artificial intelligence (AI) and
machine learning, which changes the way people process and record informations and so
on.
 Secondly, the outbreak of the pandemic also led to the development of
infrastructure, of certain public institutions, such as: hospitals by creating new emergency
reception departments and equipping them with more advanced equipment for managing
a wide spectrum of medical conditions (ATI beds, RT-PCR devices), schools by
equipping them with tablets and laptops that facilitates study and encourage all categories
of schoolchildren, high school students and students by offering equal opportunities in
the area of individual learning and the accentuation for using several online platforms,
such as Moodle and Zoom, which promote interactive methods of study and provide a
more diversified overview on a object of study by catching effective and fast
documentation.

On the other hand, the changes occured in public administration, after pandemic,
had created a significant decresse of jobs in domain because of the process of
digitization, another drawback of the pandemic was the need to obtain funds for the
digitization and endowment activities of public institutions, which imposed the
redistribution of the national budget and this created a financial deficit in other
important sectors like: agriculture, environmental protection or capping wage growth in
various public areas of activity ( police, army, gendarmerie, firefighters ) and increasing
the income of health care workers with a big percentage.

Finally, the changes planned and maintained in the public administration due to
the pandemic have generated a force for the development of the infrastructure of state
institutions both digitally and physically, this led to better results and their maintenance
in different sectors of activity, such as medical and educational sistems, but also created a
financial imbalance between different fields of activity such as medical, by substantial
wage increases, and national defense or public order institutions by capping wage
increases.