Making Public Sector Reforms Work : Political and Economic Contexts, Incentives, and Strategies
Supporting effective public sector reform is a major challenge that the World Bank and other agencies and stakeholders have been grappling with. It is increasingly recognized that political economy factors play a crucial role. However, beyond this...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2012/08/16620350/making-public-sector-reforms-work-political-economic-contexts-incentives-strategies http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12019 |
| Summary: | Supporting effective public sector
reform is a major challenge that the World Bank and other
agencies and stakeholders have been grappling with. It is
increasingly recognized that political economy factors play
a crucial role. However, beyond this broad proposition,
specific questions arise: What country contexts are
more/less propitious for public sector reforms and what
reforms are likely to succeed where? And can more explicitly
taking political economy challenges into account help to
pursue public sector reforms even in less propitious
contexts? This paper addresses these issues in two ways:
first, it draws on the existing literature to identify key
propositions about factors that can trigger or facilitate
public sector reforms, and those that tend to work against
(successful) reforms. Second, it investigates the experience
of World Bank public sector operations over the decade
2000-2010. It finds that governments in many developing
countries face incentives to initiate public sector reforms,
but that at the implementation stage, political costs
frequently outweigh potential gains; and hence reforms are
abandoned or left to wither. Real breakthroughs have been
achieved in countries experiencing major structural shifts
and those having political leadership committed to
higher-level goals. The review of operations shows that
successful projects are significantly more widespread than
the literature would lead to assume. Furthermore, it
provides tentative evidence that investing in understanding
political economy drivers has been associated with better
project performance. Key implications are the need to
differentiate between country contexts more clearly ex ante,
concentrate more on reform implementation during windows of
opportunity that are typically of limited duration, and
design reforms with a clear plan of engagement with
stakeholder incentives. |
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