“Fiscal Decentralization. Challenges for Moldova” collection has been launched

The collection “Fiscal Decentralization. Challenges for Moldova” was launched at the Academy of Public Administration on Wednesday December 13. The book sums up the two-year efforts of the experts that worked on two projects regarding the fiscal decentralization in Moldova, funded by the Open Society Institute in Budapest and Soros-Moldova Foundation. The collection has a circulation of one thousand copies and will be distributed to public institutions, administrations at all levels and libraries free of charge. One of the authors of the collection, Business Consulting Institute director Mihai Roscovan said that within the projects there was involved a large number of experts in fiscal decentralisation that carried out studies, organized presentations, seminars, a national Forum, considering more proposals to modify the legal framework in the field that come to promote the fiscal decentralization in particular and administrative decentralisation on the whole at all the levels. The specific character of this book is that the authors are both practitioners – persons holding different governing positions, starting with ordinary mayors and ending with employees of the Ministries, and experts and consultants in the field, Roscovan said. As he states, the book suggests a strategic mechanism for implementing the legislation in the field: the new Law on administrative decentralisation and the Law on local public administration, which were approved by the Parliament in July this year in first reading. Members of the Coalition for Fiscal Decentralization, who within the National Forum have signed the Memorandum on consolidation of local autonomy in Moldova (representatives of Central and Local Public Administrations, NGOs, academics and associations representing mayors), have participated in the launching. The necessity to extend and consolidate local autonomy is envisaged in the Government’s plans, including European Union-Moldova Action Plan. The bills of the two laws are introduced to improve the legal framework of the local public administration related to the local public authorities’ competences in decentralization. As experts state, the bills approved in first reading, for the time being do not clearly delimit the jurisdictions between different levels of the local public administration. At the same time, it is deemed that the laws should stipulate more financial resources for the local authorities so that they can perform their tasks at local level.