Administration in Europe

Definition of Administration

involves three distinct duties collection of the assets of a deceased person, payment of the debts, and distribution of the surplus to the persons beneficially entitled. The estate is usually administered by the executor out of Court, but it may be administered in tho Chancery Division, in a County Court if the total value does not exceed 500, by the Public Trustee if the gross capital value is less than 1,000, and in Bankruptcy if the estate is insolvent. [1]

Economic Aspects of Administration

These are numerous and complicated. In the first place administration includes the business of raising the public REVENUE. It thus includes the whole of public finance. In this light the questions as to the safe limits of TAXATION, as to the beat kinds of taxes, as to the most economical methods of levying them, as to the least harmful ways of raising and the least oppressive modes of liquidating public loans, are all administrative questions, although they are so extensive that they cannot be treated in this article.

In the second place administration includes the business of spending the public revenue. That business suggests the inquiry as to the proper functions of the state. What should the state attempt to do itself? what should it attempt to regulate? what should it leave entirely out of view?. These questions raise other than economical issues; but they raise economical issues too. Thus experience shows that in countries where capital and knowledge are rare many of the requisites of production such as RAILWAYS, CANALS, aqueducts, Docks, drainage, and irrigation works, can be provided only by administrative effort. By providing these the state does not lessen individual energy or narrow its field of action. On the contrary, by facilitating production these administrative undertakings have often strengthened the spirit of individual enterprise and accumulation.

A notable illustration of the service which may thus be rendered by an efficient administration is seen in the growing prosperity of British India. In a later stage of economic development more can be done by private effort and less needs to be done by administration. But the growing complexity of life and industry, the gathering of multitudes into large cities, the concentration of industries in huge factories, the production of the necessaries of life, not by domestic labour, but by scientific processes on a vast scale, the new combinations of labour and of capital, the increased attention given to health, the more exacting demand for enjoyment, and education, the dissolution of old customs and beliefs, all these changes bring with them difficulties which compel interference here and interference there and a vast process of administrative regulation.

No general rule can be laid down respecting the effect of such regulation ; the effect can be known in each case only by experience. All that can be said is that before regulating any branch of industry the fullest information possible should be procured, and that all new regulation should be tentative. In the third place we have to consider the economic effect of efficiency or inefficiency in administration irrespective of its objects. The industry, the integrity, and the intelligence of the administration are great economic forces. Compare the administrative staff in Turkey with the administrative staff in Prussia and consider their influence on the economic condition of their respective countries. If the administrator is an official, his efficiency will depend greatly upon the spirit, education, and traditions of the service of which he is a member ; if he is a private citizen, his efficiency will depend greatly upon the spirit, education, and traditions of the class from which he comes. In the fourth place the magnitude of the administrative staff is a circumstance of economic importance. An overgrown civil service means a great number of idlers and a waste of productive power, especially power of mind. It also means a heavier taxation of the productive classes (see BUREAUCRACY; CIVIL LIST; GOVERNMENT). [2]

Resources

Notes

1. Definition of Administration is, temporally, from A Concise Law Dictionary (1927).
2. Robert Harry Inglis, Sir, Dictionary of Political Economy, Vol. 1, 1915

See Also

Assets

Further Reading

For a general view of the modern state and its organs, see Bluntschli, Theory of the State ; for the history of the English administrative system consult Stubbs’s and Gneist’s Constitutional Histories of England ; for its present state consult the volumes on Central Government, Local Government, The National Income and Expenditure, The State in Relation to Labour, and The State in Relation to Trade in the English Citizen Series, and the statutes and other authorities to which they refer.