Regulatory reform and governance: A survey of selected developing and transition economies

Regulation is now considered an integral instrument in developing policy toolkit to support market‐led, pro‐poor growth in developing and transition economies. Institutional environment in general and regulatory governance in particular have increasingly been viewed as a factor of competitiveness. In search for better governance, regulatory reform is critical. This article assesses regulatory reform in selected developing and transition economies by reporting the results of a survey on the application of regulatory governance policies, tools and institutions. It is found that in these countries regulatory reform has not shifted in approaches and objectives to taking a systematic view of regulatory governance and the means of promoting and enhancing it. It is suggested that, in order to improve regulatory governance, focus should be put on each of the three elements: regulatory policies, tools and institutions, and that centralised and concerted efforts are needed to integrate the elements. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

„Nord“ und „Süd“ im globalen Regieren

The debate on global governance has been focused primarily on the highly industrialized countries of the OECD world. However, domestic preconditions for cooperative and effective global governance tend to be precarious in many non-OECD countries. The consideration of such factors allows to identify different types of global governance strategies employed by developing countries, which have severe implications for the concept of global governance. Such a perspective from liberal foreign policy analysis also enables a differentiated analysis of normative challenges of global governance.     

Seeing Transparency More Clearly

In recent years, transparency has been proposed as the solution to, and the cause of, a remarkable range of public problems. The proliferation of seemingly contradictory claims about transparency becomes less puzzling, this essay argues, when one appreciates that transparency is not, in itself, a coherent normative ideal. Nor does it have a straightforward instrumental relationship to any primary goals of governance. To gain greater purchase on how transparency policies operate, scholars must move beyond abstract assumptions and drill down to the specific legal, institutional, historical, political, and cultural contexts in which these policies are crafted and implemented. The field of transparency studies, in other words, is due for a “sociological turn.”     

经合组织的规制改革政策及其对我国的启示

规制改革是经合组织国家政府改革的重要组成部分。本通过对经合组织规制改革献的研究，介绍了经合组织对政府规制概念的界定和分类、对规制改革的理解和推动改革的政策建议，并分析了对我国政府改革的借鉴性意义。     

Transparency, Political Polarization, and Political Budget Cycles in OECD Countries

We investigate the effects of fiscal transparency and political polarization on the prevalence of electoral cycles in fiscal balance. While some recent political economy literature on electoral cycles identifies such cycles mainly in weak and recent democracies, in contrast we show, conditioning on a new index of institutional fiscal transparency, that electoral cycles in fiscal balance are a feature of many advanced industrialized economies. Using a sample of 19 OECD countries in the 1990s, we identify a persistent pattern of electoral cycles in low(er) transparency countries, while no such cycles can be observed in high(er) transparency countries. Furthermore, we find, in accordance with recent theory, that electoral cycles are larger in politically more polarized countries.     

Partisanship in the setting and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies

Abstract. The principal concerns of this paper are with the roles partisan politics have played in the making of fiscal and monetary policies within OECD countries as well as the extent to which these policies have complemented each other. It is argued that parties of the left pursue fiscal policies that are distinctly different from those pursued by the right. The critical difference is in the way these parties use fiscal policy as a corrective mechanism for dealing with macroeconomic problems: leftist parties adopt counter–cyclical fiscal policies while rightwing parties adhere to pro–cyclical fiscal stances. The paper also examines two arguments regarding monetary policy and how partisan politics affect this policy area. The first and most conventional argument sees the formal independence of the central bank from government as a means of negating partisan influences on monetary policy; the second advances the proposition that, regardless of central bank independence, monetary authorities are not politically neutral but instead share views similar to those of parties on the right–hand side of the political spectrum. Empirical analysis, using a pooled cross–section time–series design with data from 14 countries between 1961 and 1994, produces evidence in favor of the argument concerning the role of partisanship in fiscal policy; it also shows little support for the view that central bank independence inhibits partisan influences while at the same time provides support for the thesis that central banks are politically non–neutral. Thus, coordination between fiscal and monetary policies is far less likely to occur when left–wing parties are in power.     

Partisanship in the setting and coordination of fiscal and monetary policies

The principal concerns of this paper are with the roles partisan politics have played in the making of fiscal and monetary policies within OECD countries as well as the extent to which these policies have complemented each other. It is argued that parties of the left pursue fiscal policies that are distinctly different from those pursued by the right. The critical difference is in the way these parties use fiscal policy as a corrective mechanism for dealing with macroeconomic problems: leftist parties adopt counter–cyclical fiscal policies while rightwing parties adhere to pro–cyclical fiscal stances. The paper also examines two arguments regarding monetary policy and how partisan politics affect this policy area. The first and most conventional argument sees the formal independence of the central bank from government as a means of negating partisan influences on monetary policy; the second advances the proposition that, regardless of central bank independence, monetary authorities are not politically neutral but instead share views similar to those of parties on the right–hand side of the political spectrum. Empirical analysis, using a pooled cross–section time–series design with data from 14 countries between 1961 and 1994, produces evidence in favor of the argument concerning the role of partisanship in fiscal policy; it also shows little support for the view that central bank independence inhibits partisan influences while at the same time provides support for the thesis that central banks are politically non–neutral. Thus, coordination between fiscal and monetary policies is far less likely to occur when left–wing parties are in power.     

UK corporate governance: To what end a new regulatory state?

This article questions the importance of recent changes in the regulation of UK corporate governance. Michael Moran has observed that a new regulatory state is emerging. In the case presented here new authority was created but little changed substantively. Under Labour and Conservative ministers, governance policy was reactive and cautious. For all the new institutional capacity, governance problems and policies were conceived within existing structures of power and advantage. Any ambitions to social control that threatened the political-economic status quo were ruled out. While this may be no surprise, it suggests regulatory reorganisation need not herald dramatic change, even when politicised.     

公共部门绩效评估:来自发展中国家的经验

在过去的几年中,公共部门绩效评估的理念在很多发展中国家日渐盛行。但是,由于发展中国家的公共部门软弱无力,法律框架不一致,公共服务提供的数量和质量不足,以及问责机制不完善等因素,导致公共部门绩效评估变得愈加复杂,且充满挑战。因此,总结和分析发展中国家公共部门实施绩效测量系统所取得的经验和教训,提出更具指导性的建议就显得尤其重要。基于此,本文以菲律宾、尼泊尔和印度尼西亚三个亚洲国家公共部门的绩效测量系统为分析对象,采用案例研究的分析方法,着重探讨了近几年来这些国家在绩效测量系统的设计、实施和管理等方面的一些经验教训。尽管没有一种放之四海而皆准的解决方案,但是本文在对这些经验教训反思的基础上,总结出的具有可持续性的绩效评估系统成功的五个关键要素,即所有权、激励、简单化、透明度和部门政策目标,可以为发展中国家的公共部门绩效评估提供最好的实践指导①。     

COMRADES OR CULPRITS? DONOR ENGAGEMENT AND BUDGET TRANSPARENCY IN AID‐DEPENDENT COUNTRIES

Budget transparency has come to be considered a key aspect of governance. Over the past decade, donors have invested increasing resources in strengthening processes through which budget transparency in developing countries can be enhanced. According to the 2008 Open Budget Index (OBI) Report, however, aid dependency and budget transparency appear to be inversely correlated. This article looks at the role of donor agencies in promoting or preventing budget transparency in aid‐dependent countries. It looks at significant correlations across the whole sample of 84 countries covered in the 2008 OBI, and analyzes more specific data for a sub‐sample of 16 aid‐dependent countries, before selecting six countries for which more detailed findings are then presented. All of these countries have implemented reforms aimed at enhancing budget transparency, with substantial donor support. These, however, often had only limited success, partly because they were not well adapted to the local context, and partly because donors put limited emphasis on improving public access to budget information. Donor efforts were also often offset by other characteristics of donor interventions, namely their fragmentation, lack of transparency, and limited use of programme aid modalities such as budget support and pooled sector funding. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

International Capital Mobility and Domestic Institutions:Corporate Finance and Governance in Four European Cases

This article considers the impact of international capital mobility on thecharacter of corporate finance and corporate governance in four European countries (Germany, France, Spain, and Italy). We take issue with the widespread view that the growth of international financial markets and the lifting of capital controls will in themselves produce convergence in national systems of corporate finance and governance. Although we find evidence of convergence in specific aspects of financial regulation (e.g., the abandonment of selective credit regulation and the dismantling of barriers to universal banking), these regulatory changes have not produced any clear convergence toward either the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate finance and governance predicted in much of the literature or the alternative German bank-based model. The reasons for this, we suggest, have much to do with the way in which the politics of financialreform are likely to differ from those postulated in market-driven models of regulatory change and the fact that countries are susceptible to international pressures in different ways.     

Legitimacy through targeted transparency? Regulatory effectiveness and sustainability of lobbying regulation in the European Union

Regulating interest groups’ access to decision makers constitutes a key dimension of legitimate and accountable systems of government. The European Union explicitly links lobbying regulation with the democratic credentials of its supranational system of governance and proposes transparency as a solution to increase legitimacy and regulate private actors’ participation in policy making. This lobbying regulation regime consists of a Transparency Register that conditions access to decision makers upon joining it and complying with its information disclosure requirements. The extent to which transparency‐based regulatory regimes are successful in ensuring effective regulation of targeted actors and in being recognised as a legitimate instrument of governance constitutes a key empirical question. Therefore, the study asks: Do stakeholders perceive the transparency‐based EU lobbying regulation regime to be a legitimate form of regulatory governance? The study answers by building on a classic model of targeted transparency and proposes perceived regulatory effectiveness and sustainability as two key dimensions on which to evaluate the legitimacy of the Register. The arguments are tested on a new dataset reporting the evaluations of 1,374 stakeholders on the design and performance of the EU lobbying regulation regime. The findings describe a transparency regime that scores low in perceived effectiveness and moderate to low in sustainability. Citizens criticise the quality of information disclosed and the Register's performance as a transparency instrument. The Register did not effectively bridge the information gap between the public and interest groups about supranational lobbying. In terms of sustainability, interest organisations appreciate the systemic benefits of transparency, but identify few organisation‐level benefits. Organisations that are policy insiders incur more transparency costs so they instrumentally support transparency only insofar it suits their lobbying strategies and does not threaten their position. Insiders support including additional categories of organisations in the Register's regulatory remit but not more types of interactions with policy makers. They support an imperfect regulatory status quo to which they have adapted but lack incentives to support increased transparency and information disclosure. Targeted transparency proves an ineffective approach to regulating interest groups’ participation in EU policy making, constituting a suboptimal choice for ensuring transparent, accountable and legitimate supranational lobbying.     

Multilateral development banks,transparency and corporate clients: ‘public–private partnerships’ and public access to information

The multilateral development banks (MDB) recognise and promote transparency as a principle of good governance. Public release of information about policies and projects is a central aspect of this transparency, and the five MDBs studied here each adopted new policies during the 1990s to increase the accessibility of such information. The flow of information to local communities is important to the effectiveness of MDBs' social and environmental safeguards and to securing public support. But MDBs also embrace a second strategy, which sometimes conflicts with transparency: each MDB (or an affiliate) lends to private corporations as well as to member states and each bank modifies its information disclosure rules, giving corporate clients greater discretion than member governments. Environmental and social safeguards apply to corporate borrowers as well as to governments and there is a relatively high level of controversy over corporate projects' environmental and social impact. When subjected to a qualitative review of their disclosure standards, emphasising fullness of disclosure, accessibility of information, timeliness of information and availability of recourse, the disclosure policies of all five MDBs are clearly found to accommodate corporate confidentiality while compromising public demands for information. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public Sector Priority Setting Using Decision Support Tools

The public sector is in transition in many countries, including New Zealand, and many government departments have been restructured so as to increase transparency and accountability in their decision‐making by implementing fundamental changes to governance, accountability regimes and information systems. New frameworks are also needed for tasks such as priority setting, and this paper describes the framework developed to assist the then NZ Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) in setting priorities for the allocation of research funds. This comprised a participative process including a series of workshops using both GroupSystems software for electronic meeting support and Visual Interactive Sensitivity Analysis (VISA) software to facilitate a multi‐criteria decision analysis.     

Decoupling trends: Drivers of agency independence in telecommunications: An analysis of high and middle-income countries

Global diffusion of regulatory reforms in telecommunications has prevailed in many countries, engendering major institutional changes and entailing the establishment and/or reform of regulatory agencies. Although the triggers and timing of such agentification processes have been more or less similar, agency independence displays significant cross-country variation. Seeking to explain such variation based on a sample incorporating middle-income countries (MICs), this paper examines the impact of political-institutional settings in which the agencies operate, in addition to the impact of economic parameters. Regression analysis reveals that political rights appear as the central parameter, while their impact is more robust in MICs than in advanced countries. The results underscore considerable cross-national variation in regulatory governance, along with a noteworthy decoupling between MICs and advanced countries. Concurring with the regulatory regionalism perspective, the paper delineates distinct regional clusters, albeit remaining agnostic about the determinants of such clusters.     

Regulating public procurement in Brazil,India, and China: Toward the regulatory-developmental state

Since the 1990s, emerging economies such as Brazil, India, and China have adopted transparency-enhancing public procurement regulations in line with international norms. Yet they have hesitated to join the World Trade Organization's legally binding Government Procurement Agreement (GPA). Based on the Special Issue framework, this article scrutinizes the underlying domestic and international determinants, and how they influence emerging countries’ positions in two overlapping international procurement regimes. In particular, reform-oriented state actors, societal pressure, and lesson-drawing from international templates have induced a strengthening of domestic procurement institutions and turned emerging countries into “promoters” of the international transparency regime. Conversely, the rising powers have remained, to varying degrees, reluctant “spoilers” of the GPA-based market access regime in order to keep policy space and use procurement for domestic development objectives. The article suggests that this regulatory-developmental layering of rule-based governance and interventionist ambitions characterizes the variegated regulatory state in emerging countries.     

A Comparative Analysis: New Public Management — The Way Ahead?

A set of measures constituting 'New Public Management' (NPM) has been adopted worldwide (Pollitt 1995). This article describes their implementation in the State of Victoria. In particular, the article assesses the reforms within the context of Pollitt's eight elements of NPM reforms that have taken place in management in the public sector in Victoria and, to varying degrees, in all OECD countries. It argues that the evaluation of the success of NPM in Victoria should be addressed by independent evaluations of the impacts of the changes within the political, executive and operational spheres of government, and on consumers and the public service itself. The article offers some lessons for those in government following Victoria's example of the implementation of NPM.
Good governance is critical to ensuring that challenges to society are dealt with adequately (OECD 1995:5).     

Agenda dynamics and the multi-level governance of intractable policy controversies: the case of migrant integration policies in the Netherlands

This article focuses on the relation between agenda dynamics and multi-level governance for a specific type of policy problems: intractable policy controversies. It discusses migrant integration policies in the Netherlands as a case-study, analysing problem, political and policy agendas in the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam and on the national level, as well as the relation and interaction between these policy levels. The article shows that in a contested policy area like migrant integration, patterns of agenda setting often have a strongly level-specific character, leading to different policy frames and thus complicating modes of governance in multi-level setting. Precisely when the framing of policy problems itself is at stake, level-specific agenda dynamics will produce different policy frames also in multi-level policy settings. This makes multi-level governance in terms of effectively coordinating relations between policy levels to create congruence of policies between different levels a particular challenge when faced with this type of policy problems.     

Government employment and pay: the global and regional evidence

Against the background of paucity of complete and reliable data as the basis for sound policy, this article reports on the results of a major international survey of government employment and wages in about 100 countries. Key findings are that: in developing countries as a whole, relative government employment is now less than half the level of OECD countries; the reduction in the role of the state in the ‘decade of adjustment’ is striking, and so is the erosion in real government wages in the poorest countries—particularly in anglophone Africa; decentralization in Latin America is visible in the substantial shift of employment from central to subnational government levels; and the lean and well-paid civil service of East Asia is one possible reason why rapid economic growth could coexist for so long with the governance weaknesses that have surfaced in the form of the Asian crisis. The article then undertakes an aggregate cross-sectional analysis of the determinants of government employment. In Africa and Latin America, relative government employment is positively associated with per capita income and the fiscal deficit, and negatively associated with relative wages and population. Clearly, the tendency for government to expand as the economy grows—the so-called ‘Wagner law’—is still operative in developing countries. However, it seems no longer at work in OECD countries, suggesting that Wagner's law ceases to operate beyond certain per capita income level. The article concludes, nevertheless, with a reminder of the limits of cross-sectional analysis: even ‘good facts’ prove little by themselves—good analysis and policy must rest on country-specific quantitative and qualitative evidence. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A partisan model of government expenditure

Partisan models of budget politics largely concentrate on the size of government, budget deficits and debt, but most theories have little to say as to what the effect of party politics on both the size and the composition of budgets is. This paper seeks to extend previous literature in two directions. First, a model of spending preferences is developed that relates actors' preferred level and allocation of expenditure to electoral gains from fiscal policies. Second, changes in both total expenditure and the expenditure mix of two budget categories are analyzed for the effect of parties' spending preferences as stated in their election manifestos. Using data on 19 OECD countries from 1971 to 1999, the paper finds support for general partisan hypothesis. The results suggest that the actual spending preferences of parties matter whereas they do not indicate that parties of the left consistently differ from parties of the right in their spending behavior.