After the post-revolutionary period, over the past decades, the trends of administrative reform in Portugal followed what was happening in the rest of Europe. Regardless of the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies observed over the last twenty years, the reform process was marked by the introduction of privatization, corporatization of administrative organization, attempts to reduce bureaucracy and transparency in the relationship between government and citizens, convergence of labor regimes and restructuration of the the Central Government Administration. From 2011, following the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Portuguese government and the troika, reform was restricted mainly to the implementation of individual measures that mainly targeted cost reduction of public expenditure. By now, there are no scientific theoretical analytical results for the subject matter. For this reason, the paper presents a descriptive and exploratory approach.
reform; central government (or central public administration); troika ; MoU