The political economy of distribution in developing countries: A rent-seeking approach

Economic development in many Third World countries after independence has been biased in the sense that some, mainly urban, social groups have gained much more than the majority of the population who lives in rural areas or urban shantytowns. That bias is to a large extent caused by government policy and, accordingly, by an uneven distribution of political influence. This paper contains an analytical model reflecting the bias in the distribution of the benefits and costs of public sector activities, where those activities are determined by the distribution of political influence. The main elements of the distribution of political influence are determined in a rent-seeking game between society' different social groups.     

Property tax administration in developing countries: Alternatives for land registration and cadastral mapping

The property tax is a widely used fiscal tool in many developing countries. However, property tax evasion and underpayment are common. This fact underscores the need for governments to administer the property tax effectively if they are to maximize revenue for development. A workable system of land registration and cadastral mapping is one of the principal prerequisites for efficient administration of the property tax. This paper examines alternative methods of land registration and cadastral mapping appropriate for governments in developing countries. The registration of deeds and titles is discussed, as are the most appropriate means for their implementation. Similarly, the different types of cadastral systems, fiscal, legal and multi-purpose, and the survey methods necessary for their implementation, are reviewed.     

Policy and regulatory design for developing countries: a mechanism design and transaction cost approach

The first-generation literature on policy design has made considerable contributions over the last 30 years to our understanding of the process, politics and implications of policy design and instrument choice. This literature, however, has generally treated institutions as a black box and has not developed a coherent set of frameworks, theories and models of how institutions matter to policy design. In this paper, I unpack the black box of institutions using transaction cost and mechanism design to show how regulations can be better designed in developing countries when institutions are weak, unaccountable, corrupted or not credible. Under these conditions, I show that efficient regulatory design has to minimize transaction costs, particularly agency problems, by having incentive compatible (self-enforcing) mechanisms. I conclude with a second-generation research agenda on regulatory design with implications for environmental, food and drug safety, healthcare and financial regulation in developing countries.     

Destructive decision-making in developing countries

In most developing countries strategic decision-making has been largely based on false premises that have led to destructive results. One set of false premises stems from the assumption that development can be dissociated from the destructively exponential growth in developed countries, from the limits on the planet's physical resources and from complex ecological linkages. Another set is grounded on the popular myths of entrenched development economics: particularly, the enshrining of GNP as the overall indicator of progress, and the concomitant withdrawal of attention from poverty and concentrated wealth, unemployment, and the injurious effects of many modern technologies. These destructive premises tend to reinforce the evolving institutions of new-style empire and oligarchy.More successful development requires standing present development policies on their head through development goals calling for (1) a recognition of redistributive and nonmaterial growth possibilities, (2) redistributive, material and nonmaterial growth in developing countries, (3) redistributive, nonmaterial growth in overdeveloped countries, with a major slowing down of material consumption, (4) large-scale employment projects in developing countries, and (5) the fostering and use of more constructive technologies. All such shifts, however, would require—and tend to lead toward—substantial, long-term changes in the sociopolitical structure of developing countries and the world society.This paper is based on and adapted from The Limits of Development Administration, the keynote paper presented in October 1972 at the U.N. Public Administration Division's conference on development administration in Kiev, USSR, and Unemployment: The Snag in Development, prepared at Kiev and published in The Nation, Dec. 11, 1972.     

Toward a post-industrial planning theory

Post-industrial tendencies indicate changes in the composition of the labor force and changes in world-view. Increasingly, next to highly intellectual work and rational ways of thinking can be found work with affective content and existentially based ways of understanding. Rationalism loses effectiveness as a guide to social action because it leads to fragmentation of the experienced world. Existentialism holds out the promise of synthesizing experience into a coherent image. Because planning involves the translation of knowledge into action, these changes in cultural values and ways of understanding call for innovations in planning theory. Challenges to rationalism require creating a new constitution for planning. Synthesis of rationalism and existentialism requires articulation of an existental planning theory. Embracing existing social conflicts is necessary for accomplishing both tasks.     

An application of innovation theory to the strategy of administrative reform in developing countries

Conscious pursuit of public goals is the essence of public policymaking. Policy process involves among other things activating and mobilizing various administrative elements such as authority, structure, resources, procedures, and relations. Rationality requires that these elements become continuously restructured, revamped, and realigned in order to maximize the goal effectiveness of policy. The effort to gear administrative elements to the achievement of deliberate policy goals is administrative reform. This is a continuous and prevasive process.Now the crux of administrative reform is innovation, that is, injection of new ideas and new people in new combinations of tasks and relationships into the policy and administration process. This is, however, not an automatic process. It requires strategy in order to facilitate its adoption and diffusion throughout the public organization.The purpose of this paper is to examine the relevance of innovation theory to administration in developing countries in general and administrative reform in particular and then to devise a heuristic matrix of administrative reform strategy that brings to the fore innovational leadership and environmental factors.     

National Investment Planning and equity policy in developing countries: The challenge of decentralized administration

The impact of national economic planning in developing countries over the past three decades has been severely limited. Little evidence supports the contention that it has either directly improved investment decisions for stimulating economic growth or significantly affected development policymaking. Constraints on implementing national planning in Asia include weaknesses of political and administrative support for national plans, deficiencies in their content, difficulties of relating plan priorities to investment decisionmaking, ineffectiveness or inappropriateness of comprehensive planning methods and techniques, and inadequate administrative capacity to implement and evaluate multisectoral investment strategies. Changes in Asian development policy toward growth with equity imply the need for more decentralized methods and arrangements for planning, creation of a stronger relationship between policy planning and program implementation, and diffusion of administrative capacity among a wide variety of public and private institutions to generate, formulate and implement investment policies and projects.     

Dilemmas in a general theory of planning

The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, becuase of the nature of these problems. They are wicked problems, whereas science has developed to deal with tame problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about optimal solutions to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no solutions in the sense of definitive and objective answers.This is a modification of a paper presented to the Panel on Policy Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boston, December 1969.     

The training and development of top executives in developing countries: A tanzanian approach

The training and development of public service employees is now accepted to be a major contributor to organizational performance. In the Third World, however, much of the training effort has been directed at junior, supervisory and middle-level personnel. Top personnel were, for a long time, presumed to be ‘above training’. There is now, however, an awakening to the need for training all categories of personnel. The major constraint in most countries remains the lack of facilities and trainers able to handle senior personnel. Tanzania has recently embarked on a concerted effort to train its top public service personnel through the mobilization of all management/administrative training capabilities in a joint, concerted endeavour, under the aegis of the Ministry of Manpower Development and a body known as the National Standing Training Team on Top Executive Development (NSTT). More than 20 6-week courses have been run and a recent evaluation of the programme suggests that they are popular and have reactivated an interest in training among top executives. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that the training has resulted in improved performance in public organizations although some executives have introduced some innovations in their organizations which they derived from the training programme.     

Mobilizing local resources in developing countries

Many developing countries are putting increased pressure on local governments to mobilize resources, especially to meet the recurrent costs of operating and maintaining locally sited capital projects. Local taxes, user charges and voluntary contributions are all possible mechanisms to carry out these efforts. Yet several important issues arise whenever these mobilization instruments are contemplated and evaluated. Several, often competing, objectives must be considered when evaluating fiscal instruments including the ability of the mechanism to raise revenues, its effect on economic efficiency, its equity implications and its administrative feasibility. After discussing each of these objectives, we show how numerous constraints, including those imposed by the political/legal system, administrative structure, the economy and the culture of the country, must be recognized while searching for a workable set of reforms that will mobilize additional resources without doing great harm to the other objectives. The key to these reforms would seem to be incentives or disincentives inherent in the revenue structure. Without recognizing these incentives or attempting to alter them, resource mobilization efforts are likely to go astray.     

发展中国家的政府职能

发展中国家所面临的问题与西方发达国家不同 ,发展中国家没有建立制度化的政治秩序 ,迫在眉睫的是解决人民群众的基本生存问题 ,更没有建立起市场经济体制 ,也没有健全的法律制度。这些行政生态情况决定了发展中国家的政府职能要比西方发达国家的政府职能强。无论是经济 ,还是社会发展 ,政府主导都是发展中国家发展的必然之路。     

Rent-seeking and institutional stability in developing countries

We are grateful to Mark Toma, Gordon Tullock, Stephen Drew Smith, Bob Collinge and participants of the rent seeking panel held at the 1990 meetings of the Southern Economic Association for their helpful comments. Remaining errors are our responsibility.     

Managing research institutions in developing countries: Test of a model

This article proposes a model for the analysis, management and development of research institutes in developing countries which incorporates four interdependent dimensions: (i) a strategic management dimension concerned with the management of the organisation's internal and external environments and their interrelationships; (ii) a dimension concerned with ‘collaborative institutional arrangements’; (iii) an internal management and supervision dimension; and (iv) a ‘research operations’ dimension. A preliminary corroboration of the model's validity is derived from a review of relevant published literature and summaries of evaluation studies of research institutions in developing countries.     

Policy planning and management dialogue with countries in transition

The economic and social transformation of the socialist state is a central concern of public policy planning. This article discusses three aspects of this challenge: the growth of policy interventions in the welfare state; modalities of public policies; and the organization of public policy planning. Modernization of public management in the west underscores the respective rationalities of state and market. The modern welfare state is now under financial pressure, cutbacks proceed and privatization and deregulation take hold. The author appraises these trends and their implications for countries in transition. Emphasis is placed on the need to demarcate public and private whilst at the same time building in social protection through public participation in policy planning.     

Rethinking economic openness and macro control in developing countries

The Chinese economy is at a critical point in both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) reform and WTO accession. Both events challenge the stability of Chinese economy. After the hit of Southeast Asian economic crisis, policies toward economic openness and macro control need be considered carefully. This paper provides a review of economic opening policies adopted in developing countries and a review of causes and consequences of the Southeast Asian economic crisis. Lessons for Chinese economy are summarized. A major conclusion of the paper is that although the Southeast Asian type of economic crisis due to the high foreign debt ratio may not happen in China, the internal debt and smoothness of transformation of the economic system to meet the demand of an open economy may be the major challenge. I thank Dr. Xiaobo Hu for his suggestion in restructuring the paper in early stage. Thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. The remaining errors are mine. Early vision of the paper was presented at the Conference of Social Science Development for 21^st Century in China in June 1998 in Beijing. He received his Ph.D in Economics from Ohio State University in 1993. His research interests are in economic development in rural China, international trade policies in Asia, and urban economics. His recent articles are published in journals such asEconomic Development and Cultural Change, Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, China Economic Review, andASEAN Economic Bulletin.     

Trajectories in public administration reforms in European Continental countries

The aim of this article is to study key New Public Management (NPM) transformations undertaken at central level in the European Union public administrations of Germanic, Nordic and Southern European countries. Our study shows that there is no global tendency towards the same NPM model, although, within public administration models, there are strong similarities. Although some NPM initiatives have been taken as steps towards implementing these reforms, in other contexts they could have been adopted in order to ward off deeper reforms.     

Elections and the structure of taxation in developing countries

This article analyses the impact of the electoral calendar on the composition of tax revenue (direct versus indirect taxes). It thus represents an extension of traditional political budget-cycle analyses assessing the impact of elections on overall revenue. We appeal to the opportunistic political budget model of Drazen and Eslava (2010) to predict the relationship between taxation structure and elections. Panel data from 56 developing countries over the 1980–2006 period reveals a clear pattern of electorally-related policy interventions. Taking the potential endogeneity of election timing into account, we find robust evidence of lower indirect taxes being applied by incumbent governments in the period just prior to an election. Indirect tax revenue in election years is estimated to be 0.3 GDP percentage points lower than in other years, corresponding to a fall of about 3.4% of the average figure in the sample countries, while there is no such relationship with direct tax revenue.     

Administrative reform in developing countries: A comparative perspective

This study investigates administrative reform in seven Arab states, delineates common problems and describes general tendencies via content analysis of official statements. The study deals with reform in three major phases: defining administrative problems and needs; developing strategies for reform; and developing instruments of action for implementation. Appraisal of reform efforts discloses mediocre results based on a poor implementation record attributable to incongruities of methods and objectives of reform. Among such incongruities are the conventional limitations of bureaucracy, the copying of Western administrative rationality in form if not in substance, and insufficient attention paid to traditional, cultural, religious, and political contexts of administration. Recognizing the difficulties involved in conceptualizing and implementing reform in any society, the analysis offers several recommendations to improve the outcome of reform efforts, among them: encouraging employee involvement in reform decisions; improving collected diagnostic data; providing special training for employees responsible for managing reform; soliciting unwavering political commitment; developing incentive systems; and replacing the piecemeal approach with reliance on a systems perspective.