The recent financial crisis, since the beginning transformed in a worldwide economic and fiscal one, triggered a necessary mechanism of organizational responses aimed at surviving and exceeding such a difficult period. In the necessity to understand the situation and to find some plausible ways to manage the austerity and overcome the decline at the organizational level, the interest on the cutback management literature in the public administration field has been revived after more than twenty years. Previous literature on the topic, that is mostly the one of the 80s, chiefly focused on the different cutback approaches public managers can resort to in a retrenchment period (looking at the advantages and disadvantages of each one of them), on the usual sequence of cuts in different expenditure categories (capital expenditures, operating cuts and program measures), and on the public management changes that ordinarily characterize a declining organization (Raudla et al., 2013). The awakening of this interest, in addition to benefit from the aspects already considered by the foregoing literature, has also highlighted the limitations of previous studies. Indeed they seem to consist of conceptual papers or single case studies (Maher and Deller, 2007), missing empirical evidence on a national and international base.
Key-words: Amministrazioni Pubbliche
