showed that in Italy, municipal directors are aware of a public administration now being oriented toward new public management where they are assessed according to the results they produce. The term New Public Management (NPM) expresses the idea that the cumulative flow of policy decisions over the past twenty years has amounted to a substantial shift in the governance and management of the “state sector” in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Scandinavia, North America, and Latin America. For instance, regional innovation agencies were created under NPM principles to support the innovation process. A benign interpretation is that these decisions have been a defensible, if imperfect, response to policy problems. Those problems as well as their solutions were formulated within the policy-making process. The agenda-setting process has been heavily influenced by electoral commitments to improve macro-economic performance and to contain growth in the public sector, as well as by a growing perception of public bureaucracies as being inefficient. The alternative-generation process has been heavily influenced by ideas coming from economics and from various quarters within the field of management. Globalization The initial New Public Management (NPM) reforms implemented in Anglo-Saxon countries inspired reforms across the world. These reforms, which were triggered and motivated by a variety of factors and resulted in the development of various models, led to the emergence of a global NPM trend. Despite the global nature of the movement, the concepts and models of the reform were diverse and developed in accordance with each country's specific and unique context and in response to the distinct challenge that it was facing. Therefore, in spite of the common features of the reforms, their driving factors, objectives, extent, and areas of focus varied across countries. While, in many countries, NPM reforms were inspired and influenced by the reforms implemented beyond their national boundaries, the driving factors of the reforms varied significantly across regions as well as across countries of the same region. In Europe, for instance, whereas the reforms in the Netherlands started in reaction to fiscal stringency, the driving factor for reform in Germany came from within the system as local government managers and politicians were dissatisfied with the traditional bureaucratic system and its shortcomings. Moreover, although the NPM reforms of Switzerland were influenced by the Netherlands' Tilburg model, their main motivator was dissatisfaction with the old public management system and its deficiencies. In Africa, on the other hand,