Suchergebnisse

In Slovenia, attorneys as part of the justice system represent an autonomous and independent service that is regulated by law. As set out in the decision of the Constitutional Court of RS, there is no doubt that the legislature has to adopt the law to regulate the attorneys? profession, but in its attempt of such regulation, the legislature always collides with the constitutional requirement that the attorneys are autonomous and independent. Therefore, when regulating the attorneys? profession, the legislature has to address the issues of autonomy and independence, and thus also the question of determining attorney tariffs, while certain issues must be left to be autonomously regulated within the attorneys? profession. The attorney tariff does not determine a mandatory price of legal services because an attorney and his client may always reach an agreement that is different from the attorney tariff. However, the tariff is binding when the court decides on the obligation to reimburse the party who has succeeded in a dispute for their attorney costs. With our research, we have empirically demonstrated that the existing attorney tariff in Slovenia unjustifiably drains smaller law firms, which guarantee an efficient coverage of population and smaller undertakings with a network of legal services.

In the legislation in force on Slovenian territory, public institutes as a legal form of carrying out statutory utilities have a colourful history. Initially, they became very widespread in the 1950's, when they were being established as independently financed institutes in many public service fields. With the introduction of a new constitutional and social-political system after 1991, the legislator introduced a special organisational model for the provision of non-profit activities, namely both for those that were to be performed in the public sector – as statutory utilities, as well as for those that were to be performed in the private sector – as non-profit activities. For the public sector, a form of public institutes was asserted, and a form of private institutes for the private sector. The purpose of this text is to display the legal status, assets, management and financing of public institutes in Slovenian legislation.

The forms of the state order depend on legal independence / dependence of the organisational parts that make up a state, and on the legal relationships established among them. These relationships are either centralised or decentralised. It is characteristic of the state that it has central authority extending over the entire national territory. The decisions made by this authority are obligatory and binding for all population. It is particularly characteristic of the state that through its branched organisation, also non-centralised authorities are established. They extend over organisationally restricted area and their decisions are not obligatory and binding for all their residents, but only for the inhabitants of a narrower community. Of course, here is the issue of the content and scope of the non-centralised units, which is the research subject in this paper.

KEY WORDS: • decentralisation • political decentralisation • territorial decentralisation • administrative decentralisation • fiscal decentralisation • Slovenia • European Union

When national authorities decide what activities will be needed to provide public goods and to what extent, they must also make a decision on the modes of allocation and distribution of public goods (which are the objects of public service provision) among users. In the practice of the EU Member States, a variety of diverse public service provision systems can be found. They vary between the public sector and the market, and they include numerous and highly diverse organisational forms of public service provision. A public enterprise is one of them. In the Slovenian legal regulation, a variety of problems arise due to the deficiencies in the existing public enterprise organisation. These problems mostly result from some public enterprise status issues regulated under private law. The biggest problem of statutory regulation of the public enterprise status in Slovenia is certainly the absence of a special organisational model of the public enterprise.

KEYWORDS: • public services • public enterprise • legal framework • Slovenia

Socio-economically based functional regions, which are partially self-contained economic areas, are often more suitable for various structural analyses, implementation of state and regional policies, development of state administration, planning and monitoring of spatial development, identification of spatial disparities and other analyses of socio-economic relations than the traditional historically and geographically based administrative regions. This article therefore examines the assumption that functional regions are a suitable basis for the formation of territorial provinces in Slovenia. We have modelled the functional regions of Slovenia according to the established and internationally accepted method CURDS and compared them with the current proposals for provinces and established statistical regions in Slovenia. The results show a very strong functional contiguity and a good economic balance of eight provinces and a very good population balance of the provinces with two special status urban municipalities.

Because of the public sector crisis, the role of the state in the provision of public service activities has been gradually changing ever since the 1980s, as the role of the financier in public infrastructure, as well as of the provider of public service activities, was increasingly being assumed by the private sector, while the state began to strengthen its role in the areas of regulation and supervision.With the involvement of the private sector in the so-called project financing of investments in construction of infrastructure and the consequent provision of public service activities, new and innovative forms of cooperation between the public and private sector (public-private partnership) have gradually been introduced as an addition to the already established concession and public procurement relationships. At the same time, states have in addition to classic (budgetary) financing gradually introduced new ways of financing public service activities, which enabled the repayment of investments in public infrastructure and reimbursement of (private) providers for goods delivered or services rendered (public goods). Undoubtedly, these forms of cooperation between the public and private sector call for regulation of certain complex issues. This article focuses on the examination of forms of integration between the public and private sector in the provision of public service activities in the framework of concession relationships.

All EU nationals have the right to health services that are affordable for everyone under the same conditions. Sector-specific regulations provide that health services are services of general interest that must be implemented through a national legal framework. The state must design the universal health services in a way that respects the principle of public health service affordability for all citizens. In the study, we focused on understanding the legal framework which serves as foundation the regulating universal health services in Slovenia, sector-specific regulations and other acts, and tried to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Slovenian legal framework. Our efforts have been directed towards studying the legislative framework of the European Union and defining the legal guidelines that establish the legal framework for universal health service creation.

This paper examines the compliance of the system of financing the local self-government in Slovenia with the basic principles of the theory of decentralisation, and with the guidelines of the European Charter of Local Self-Government, thereby focusing primarily on the level of coverage of costs within the municipal competence by using the allocated appropriate expenditure resources. We ascertained that, overall, during the observed period from 2007 to 2009, the Slovenian municipalities were adequately supported financially because average expenditures were around 9% lower than the appropriate expenditure resources. Major system anomalies were detected in a micro-analysis of selected groups of municipalities, especially through a relatively large range between the lowest and highest costs. The range was between €319 and €1,167 per capita (an average of €527). A similarly great range was perceived also in the appropriate expenditure amount (between €416 and €1,196 with an average of €558), and in the index of resource coverage with expenditures where the range was between 0.50 and 1.75 (an average is 1.09). In spite of the fact that there were fewer than 15% of the municipalities that fell under the threshold categories, the sustainability of the entire system worsened due to the cross-impact effect when a relatively small amount of appropriate expenditure belonged to some municipalities with high costs. This was especially evident in the case of urban municipalities. Thus, urban municipalities recoded, on average, up to +13% more costs with an average of 26-percent smaller value of the appropriate expenditure amount.

The so-called decentralization of public procurement in EU Member States is accepted as the most suitable design of the public procurement system, often justified by greater economic efficiency and by the possibility of boosting the development of small and medium-sized enterprises, which act on the public procurement market as providers of goods, services and works. Despite the existence of highly decentralized public procurement systems which reflect the decentralization of administrative systems, especially after the recession, there is a stronger tendency for centralization of public procurement in the EU. The so-called aggregation of demand by contracting authorities can be done in order to achieve economies of scale, including lower prices and transaction costs as well as to improve and professionalize the management of procurement procedures (as highlighted in the Directive 2014/24/EU by the European Parliament and the EU Council). However, even in the context of public procurement centralization, local contracting authorities (i.e., public administration authorities and organizations) in Member States should be provided with a sufficiently wide range of possible (centralized) organizational structures and contractual (vertical and horizontal) public-public partnerships which will allow them to select the most suitable and most economically effective organizational structure for the execution of public procurement.

This research paper focuses on the compliance of the actual system of financing local self-government in Slovenia with the basic principles of the theory of decentralization and guidelines of the European charter of local self-government. It addresses the level of costs coverage within the municipal competence by using the allocated appropriate expenditure resources calculated according to the Law of financing municipality Act. The purpose of the paper is, therefore, to look for an answer to the question whether and to what extent the obtained funds correspond to the actual workload that municipalities have for performing statutory tasks and for exercising their competences. Analysis shows that, on an aggregate level, these actual systems ensure enough resources for local governments to cover their actual costs and current expenditures ; some groups of municipalities, e. g. larger urban municipalities, municipalities with large proportions of elderly people etc. are faced with lack of funding, according to the actual costs data available, while other groups of municipalities receive more funds than they need.

Deregulation of professional services is universally praised for assisting lower prices, higher quality, and faster innovation pace benefiting the public. However, major authorities in economic science (from A. Smith to R. Coase) agreed that efficient regulation is needed to reduce frictions and promote trade. Particularly legal services demonstrate numerous forms of inefficiencies, requiring a thorough microeconomic evaluation before optimising the regulation. The highly polarised market is split in two segments with regulation mostly needed at its bottom. For this purpose, we developed our regulation curve model that supports the introduction of regulatory remedies. Our longitudinal study of Slovenian legal offices population mainly rejects the private capture hypothesis and exposes political risks of regulation, which might lead to the "tragedy of commons". Imposed lawyer's tariff freeze since 2003 paradoxically hurts the pillars of a network warranting physical and economic accessibility of legal services for most vulnerable groups. We estimate that the lawyer's tariff in Slovenia is undervalued almost by half, but only a slow increase can be expected due to political costs and the fiscal effects. Dismal perspectives for lawyer's profession divert capable new entrants to start the career, causing long-term gap in labour supply. Thus, we concentrated on modelling the minimum requirements for a financially viable network coverage in order to support positive externalities.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.ee.29.3.19826