Innovating Bureaucracy for a More Capable Government
Improving government capability is one of the main challenges of economic development. There is consensus around the core policies needed for developing countries to achieve equitable growthand reduce extreme poverty. But government capability—its...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Report |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/249891549999073918/Innovating-Bureaucracy-for-a-More-Capable-Government http://hdl.handle.net/10986/31284 |
| Summary: | Improving government capability is one
of the main challenges of economic development. There is
consensus around the core policies needed for developing
countries to achieve equitable growthand reduce extreme
poverty. But government capability—its ability to
effectively implement these polices and efficiently achieve
the desired outputs in regulation, infrastructure provision,
and service delivery—varies considerably across countries
and across policy domains within countries.The ability,
motivation, and productivity of the personnel who populate
government bureaucracies are key determinants of government
capability. Capable organizations are those that can select
high-ability personnel, provide them with the necessary
resources, and motivate them to work toward the
organization’s objectives and to serve the public. In
Russia, 60 percent of the price variation in standard
procurement contracts is due to the ability of individual
bureaucrats andthe quality of the organizations in which
they work. If the worst-performing 20 percent of bureaucrats
can be made as effective as the median bureaucrat, the
Russian government would save 10 percent of its procurement
costs. In Nigeria, there is substantial variation in the
quality of organizational management across the federal
government, and a one standard deviation increase in the
quality of management would lead to a 32 percent increase in
project completion rates. Public sector compensation and
employment practices also have significant implications for
the competitiveness of the overall labor market, and on
fiscal sustainability. Governments face important choices
relating to the size of the public sector and the
compensation of its workers. Low public sector wages can
result in difficulties in recruiting and retaining qualified
workers; but large wage premiums for public sector workers
can discourage private sector jobs and lead to search
unemployment. A rising wage bill is also often associated
with problems of fiscal sustainability. The report focuses
primarily on the supply side of governance and does not
delve into the political economy of public administration,
for both conceptual and methodological reasons. The domain
of citizen engagement is largely at the point of service
delivery or revenue collection, and not at the upstream
administrative tier. It is unlikely that bureaucrats have
regular contact with citizens, and any citizen voice would
need to be transmitted via “the long route of
accountability”—from citizen to politician and then from
politician to bureaucrat (World Bank 2003). Asking
bureaucrats about their interactions with politicians
through surveys, however, is a difficult and sensitive
topic, and one that has been broached only cautiously in our
work to date. Methodologically, it requires more
experimental approaches, which adds complexity to the
surveys, and is an ambition for future work. |
|---|