Restructuring Government Organization in China and Transforming Government Functions for an Efficient and More Productive Bureaucratic Performance

A sustained, steady economic development and a stable, prosperous society cannot come about by focusing only on the formulation of concrete social and economic policies. Increased attention and priority should be given to the reform of the state apparatus itself, especially of the policymaking and implementation process. Administrative structural reform, particularly China's practice of adjusting organizational structure and transforming government functions and management processes, is an example of the efforts to explore strategies and approaches for the conduct of administrative restructuring and enhancing bureaucratic performance in developing countries.
This article discusses three questions: first, the necessity of adjusting the government organizational structure and rationalizing the administrative policymaking mechanism, as well as some practices in China; second, transforming government management processes towards adapting to the changing social and economic environment in developing countries, e.g., describing what has been done by China in order to change direct and micro-management; and third, concentrating on improving efficiency and productivity.     

Developing economics expertise for the evaluation of primary health care

Given that government budgets are increasingly stretched in the face of competing demands, there is a pressing need for evidence on the costs and benefits of public sector investments. Nowhere is this need greater than in the health field, where the benefits of programmes are typically difficult to measure. Within the health sector a key area of interest is primary health care, which is generally regarded as a central function and the most important means by which the health of the population can be improved. This paper reports the results of a recent survey of Commonwealth countries which sought to establish the extent of economic evaluation of PHC programmes, the impact on decision-making and the level of health economics expertise available in Third World countries. Based on the results of the survey, suggestions are made for improving the commissioning and conduct of economic evaluations, for interpreting and implementing evaluation results, and for developing government expertise in economic evaluation.     

ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: CONCEPTS, ISSUES, AND THE NATIONAL EXPERIENCE

This symposium examines issues related to the links between administrative reform policy and economic development policy. The symposium introduction paper consists of two parts. First, it offers an overview of the background of theoretical and conceptual issues that are important to the connection between administrative reform and economic development. The issues reviewed include the role of government in economic development, the importance of public policy and management to economic development, the contribution of development administration, and the need of administrative reform to remove bureaucratic problems and promote efficiency. Next, the introduction paper provides a brief summary of the research arguments and findings addressed in the following six articles. They include an evaluation of administrative reform in Arab world economic growth, an examination of administrative reform and economic development in Latin America and the Caribbean, a political economy analysis of policy reform in Korea, a study of the implementation of privatization strategies in India's public sector reform, a discussion of the concerns between efficiency and ethics in China's economic development, and the study of administrative and economic development in Mongolia. The implications of the research findings and the need for further study of the linkage between administrative reform and economic development are emphasized in the conclusion.     

进一步改善公共服务的改革方向

本文基于OECD各成员国所制定的并实施的成功的公共服务创新措施和实践战略,提出了一个有关公共服务改革管理的框架.在明确了公共服务面临的来自内部和外部的严峻挑战的基础上,指出了进一步改善公共服务的改革方向.     

Lessons from the new public management in commonwealth nations

The New Public Management (NPM) is unlike any other public sector reform for the simple fact that it is practitioner-driven as well as a global movement. However, what works in one public sector circumstance may not work in another political, social, or economic setting. By surveying the Commonwealth countries I find that NPM reforms are taking place in all Commonwealth countries regardless of their various stages of economic and political development. This evidence confirms that the administrative reform of NPM measures is truly a global public sector reform movement.     

Civil Service Reforms in Italy: The Importance of External Endorsement and Administrative Leadership

The traditional portrait of civil servants in Italy, as well as in most other countries, has always been one of not particularly efficient employees yet have the benefit of a secure job and can look forward to a comfortable retirement package. In order to change this image, public management reforms have largely focused on civil servants since the 1990s. However, many academics and practitioners claim some inertia in the reform implementation. In this article we aim to identify the determinants of such inertia in Italy's civil service reforms and we analyze data from 885 Italian municipalities expected to adopt the pay system reform for senior officials, as required by national legislature. Our findings stress the importance of accrued legitimacy, external public endorsement, and the influence of key internal stakeholders (like administrative leaders) as major vehicles to promote or slow down the implementation of administrative reforms in the public sector.     

Civil Service Law in the People's Republic of China: A Return to Cadre Personnel Management

Despite the outward appearance of depoliticization, the civil service in China today is actually being repoliticized. This paper compares the 1993 Provisional Regulations on State Civil Servants with the Civil Service Law approved by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in April 2005 . The 2005 reform formalized what had been a historical pattern—the Communist Party holds tight control over leadership change and management at various levels. The Civil Service Law has turned the Communist Party of China into a political institution that has become the source of both civil service empowerment and control. Although civil service reform in China differs markedly from approaches adopted elsewhere, China is clearly expanding its political control to ensure greater leverage over the bureaucracy. In this regard, China is in line with the global trend. That said, civil service reform in China has focused on structural elements and formal reorganizations, whereas most industrialized democracies have engaged in a dialectic between individualist and corporate responses to managerial questions. An understanding of the Chinese ability to adopt reforms—while strengthening its traditional hold—provides key perspectives not only on the world's largest nation and a rapidly emerging force in global political and economic relationships but also on the Chinese experience with important public sector reforms that have occurred in many other countries over recent decades.     

Private sector investment in the development of the Bahamas: Lessons learned from successful programme implementation

One of the most significant problems developing nations have faced in recent years has been finding effective ways of implementing development plans and programmes. This is in large part due to the dearth of knowledge about programme implementation, and the lack of attention given to the design of implementation strategies by planners and administrators in third world nations. But, implementation is now becoming a central concern of governments in developing countries and of officials in international funding institutions. Also, development administration theory in the 1980s is likely to have as its dominant focus the improvement of implementation management of development programmes and projects. One way to improve the management of development programmes and projects is to analyse those development projects that have succeeded, identify the factors that appear to influence successful implementation, and disseminate this information as broadly and quickly as possible to relevant administrators and administrative theorists. It is revealing that relatively few studies of this type have been completed. This article outlines the lessons learned from a programme that the Government of the Bahamas is successfully implementing-the encouragement of foreign private sector investment in the Bahamas. The article (a) briefly outlines th'e plan for encouraging foreign investment, (b) describes the basic approaches and techniques the Bahamian Government has learned to use to improve the prospects of implementing this programme, and (c) indicates how this experience may be potentially useful in guiding the implementation of similar programmes in other developing countries.     

Health systems decentralization and human resources management in low and middle income countries

The aim of this article is to explore the experiences of human resources management in the context of health sector decentralization. The initial review of health sector decentralization covers issues relating to the context, content, formulation/implementation and impact of decentralization. The review of the literature on human resources management (HRM) and decentralization has identified a number of key points that are organized around the following HRM functions: HR planning/ staff supply, personnel administration and employee relations, and performance management. The importance of the management of change is also highlighted. The article concludes by emphasizing the need to include human resources as a key issue in health systems change and emphasizes the areas of policy dialogue and research. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Administrative reform in Jamaica: A component of structural adjustment

Jamaica is currently undergoing a major innovative administrative reform programme (ARP). The impetus for the ARP stems from the realization that weak public administration (as prevailed in Jamaica) is a major obstacle to the implementation of economic reforms. The ARP thus became a significant plank of the World Bank's structural adjustment lending to Jamaica. The Jamaican programme is probably the leading and most ambitious attempt at administrative reform in the Third World, and the experiences and lessons learnt can be applied to the many developing countries which are contemplating or implementing similar programmes. The Jamaican experience indicates that the most important ingredients for success are political commitment at the highest level, a determined external agency, a carefully designed but flexible participatory programme which learns as it progresses, and good communication of the reform proposals. Administrative reform is a long-term process, and it would be dangerous to pitch expectations too high.     

Challenges for donor agency country‐level performance assessment: a review

This review of country‐level performance assessment in donor agencies is primarily based upon the experiences documented by bilateral donors to developing countries. The review suggests that four emerging themes can be identified in the literature on country‐level performance review: ownership, decentralisation and leadership, accountability and learning and complexity. The review considers the implementation of ‘results‐based’ approaches used by a number of international agencies and examines their relationship with ‘evidence‐based’ approaches. A key challenge, in the development of performance assessment, is bringing in a stronger evidence‐based approach into the planning and evaluation of donor country‐level programmes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public sector reform in a poor,aid‐dependent country,Tanzania

African public sectors went through many changes during the 1960s and 1970s in response to political, economic and social pressures. They expanded in size but remained, at least in design, hierarchical and centralized. Their formal relations to society did not undergo any significant changes either. Generally, the reforms now under way are significantly different from earlier ones. Most are inspired by the new public management (NPM) paradigm. They are also much more radical in their aims, among which are: to reduce the core functions of the state; redraw the boundaries between political and administrative responsibilities; emphasize efficiency; redefine relations between public and private sectors; strengthen accountability; reduce corruption; reorganize organizations and staff; change values and attitudes; and exploit new technologies. This article focuses on a paradox of reform in Tanzania: multiple changes are pursued in the public sector despite fragile domestic political support to the reform package as a whole and despite few service delivery improvements on the ground. It is argued that this is the result of substantial external influences, fragmented domestic policy making, weak links between policy making and implementation, and questionable assumptions about some of the key NPM‐inspired reform measures. Moreover, the analyses highlight a number of differences with some of the recent reform literature. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The State Central Economic Bureaucracies and the Outcome of Systemic Economic Reform: An Institutional Explanation for the Soviet and Chinese Experiences

This article uses an institutional approach to explain the different economic reform outcomes in the Soviet Union and China. It studies how the different institutional positions of the Soviet and Chinese central economic bureaucracies give them different power resources to resist economic reform policies. This article shows that crucial differences between the two regimes in historical experiences, economic development strategies, and ideologies on bureaucratic rationality created different levels of institutional participation by the two central economic bureaucracies in state economic policymaking, and different economic management structures. Specifically, in the Soviet Union there was a strong participatory bureaucracy and a ministerial, vertically based economic management structure. In China however, there was a state leader dominated, politically weak bureaucracy and a provincial, horizontally based economic management structure. These crucial institutional differences, I argue, later gave the two central economic bureaucracies not only different incentives but also different resources to resist and sabotage economic reforms.     

Focusing on public value: Something new and something old

This article develops two propositions. First, that the public sector needs new stories that make sense of recent storms of change. Second, that focusing on ‘public value’ helps tell a useful new story. Much contemporary commentary comes from analysts working within a particular field of thought. However, problems of public policy and management are hard to discipline. Public value is not the property of particular political parties, public service institutions, academic disciplines or professions. Public value is defined and redefined through social and political interaction. Such interaction involves politicians, officials and communities. Focusing on public value enables one to aggregate issues for scholarly analysis in terms that should also make sense to citizens and communities, political activists and people responsible for delivering public services. The article argues that: recent agendas for public sector change overlap and that implementation is incomplete; the skills of analysts and activists in the public sector, and in associated sectors delivering public services, need large components of expertise in interpreting ambiguous patterns and the management of complex relationships; and that the cumulative impact of succeeding agendas is to widen the scope of issues in play. Large components in both reform and agendas have involved bringing the public sector firmly under political control. However, the later emphasis on consultation and participation places political executives under great pressure. The more deliberation is promised the more is demanded. There is increasing pressure for the task of exploring for public value to be shared more widely. The article develops its key propositions by exploring three main themes: first, the notion of public value and the emphasis in it on search and interaction as a basis for political and managerial leadership; second, the contested impacts of recent agendas of change in the public and other affected sectors which have widened the scope of issues in play but have left key institutional and policy issues unresolved; and, third, a sample of current and emerging issues in which asking questions about public value may help activists, politicians and managers more creatively focus their attention. Focusing on public value can help communities, service providers and political leaders ask and answer a new and wider range of questions while continuing to learn from recent experience, however complex and contested.     

The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership Under Pressure by Arjen Boin,Paul 't Hart,Eric Stern,and Bengt Sundelius

ABSTRACT

The article addresses two principal questions: how public management reforms develop in a context of high government turnover, and how, under these circumstances, features of the specific area of public management policy affect the dynamics of the reform and in particular its “technical feasibility.” The research questions are addressed through the case study of the Italian administrative context between 1992 and 2007, a period marked by tumultuous government turnovers. The article presents reforms in two policy areas of public management: civil service reform and innovation, over a three-period time span covering 15 years. The brief duration of political leadership represents a threat to the approval and implementation of policy interventions irrespective of the political salience of the issue and the need for legal enactment. Therefore, the success of a public management reform process in an unstable political context characterized by frequent government turnovers depends on meeting certain conditions for successful policy entrepreneurship: the a priori expertise of policy entrepreneurs, their ability to repackage the issue, keep a community of practice alive, and maneuver the dynamics of the legal process. However, implementation, being a less visible phase, suffers from greater discontinuity as “maintenance activities” necessary for the success of reform are disregarded. Thus, the consideration of the temporal dimension of the policy cycle and the area-specific effects on public management reform dynamics exerted by diverse levels of political salience and legal enactment represent the main contributions of this work to the theories on public management policy change.     

FLYING BLIND? EVIDENCE FOR GOOD GOVERNANCE PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM AGENDAS,IMPLEMENTATION AND OUTCOMES IN LOW INCOME COUNTRIES

Although considerable resources and attention have been allocated to recent ‘good governance’ public management reform in low income and fragile states, there is little evidence as to what degree this agenda has been implemented nor as to whether it has led to improved services and outcomes for populations. To address this lacuna, we conduct a review of the large but almost entirely qualitative literature on good governance reform in the 49 countries classed as low income by the United Nations. We find only a small number of documents that link good governance public sector reform agendas with implementation. Fewer still assess outcome. We conduct an empirical analysis of the relationship between reform agenda (using data from the literature review), implementation, service delivery and outcomes, as measured by performance on Millennium Development Goals indicators. We report that there is little, if any, empirical evidence that reform enhances service delivery. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Livelihood strategies and performance of Ghana's health and education sectors: exploring the connections

The public sector in Africa is riddled with widespread ineffectiveness. Although some countries have implemented various reform programmes with the support of international development agencies, the results so far have been disappointing. One reason for the failure is that the policies have focussed more on achieving macroeconomic stability than making the organisations effective. This article explores a fundamental problem of the policies—the need to focus on the human component of organisational performance. Using education and health organisations in Ghana as examples, the article advances a hypothesis that the livelihood strategies of public sector employees and the performance of their organisations are interconnected. Specifically, it is argued that as public sector employees have become more dependent on multiple sources of income, they have developed multiple social identities, which influence the culture of their organisations. The organisational culture may have encouraged employee effectiveness in some cases, but for most organisations, it has resulted in practices that perpetuate inefficiency and poor performance. To be successful, public sector reform policies must therefore involve deliberate efforts to change organisational cultures. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Institutional development in the era of economic policy reform: Concerns,contradictions and illustrations from Malawi

The article argues that the essence of economic policy reform programmes—both their substance and their pace—runs counter to the central notions of sound institutional development. Attention is first given to some fundamental concerns about the relationship between the two processes, in particular focusing on questions of culture, speed of change and the political environment. The article then provides some illustrations from Malawi, looking in turn at collateral institutional damage, the new generation of semiautonomous organizations, confusing incentives systems in the areas of salaries, housing and training, and lack of serious concern for the sustainability of the reforms. The conclusion calls for returning ‘part-ownership’ of the reform programme to the local officials, and trying to reduce some of the institutional unreality, which seems to adhere to the implementation of the reforms.     

Legitimacy and context: implications for public sector reform in developing countries

This article examines the interplay between legitimacy and context as key determinants of public sector reform outcomes. Despite the importance of variables such as legitimacy of public institutions, levels of civic morality and socio‐economic realities, reform strategies often fail to take such contextual factors into account. The article examines, first, relevant literature – both conceptual and empirical, including data from the World Values Survey project. It is argued that developing countries have distinctive characteristics which require particular reform strategies. The data analysed shows that in Latin American countries, there is no clear correlation between confidence in public institutions and civic morality. Other empirical studies show that unemployment has a negative impact on the level of civic morality, while inequality engenders corruption. This suggests that poorer and socio‐economically stratified countries face greater reform challenges owing to the lack of legitimacy of public institutions. The article concludes that reforms should focus on areas of governance that impact on poverty. This will in turn help produce more stable outcomes. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.