Reforming the Public Sector


Book Description

Many countries are still struggling to adapt to the broad and unexpected effects of modernization initiatives. As changes take shape, governments are challenged to explore new reforms. The public sector is now characterized by profound transformation across the globe, with ramifications that are yet to be interpreted. To convert this transformation into an ongoing state of improvement, policymakers and civil service leaders must learn to implement and evaluate change. This book is an important contribution to that end. Reforming the Public Sector presents comparative perspectives of government reform and innovation, discussing three decades of reform in public sector strategic management across nations. The contributors examine specific reform-related issues including the uses and abuses of public sector transparency, the "Audit Explosion," and the relationship between public service motivation and job satisfaction in Europe. This volume will greatly aid practitioners and policymakers to better understand the principles underpinning ongoing reforms in the public sector. Giovanni Tria, Giovanni Valotti, and their cohorts offer a scientific understanding of the main issues at stake in this arduous process. They place the approach to public administration reform in a broad international context and identify a road map for public management. Contributors include: Michael Barzelay, Nicola Bellé, Andrea Bonomi Savignon, Geert Bouckaert, Luca Brusati, Paola Cantarelli, Denita Cepiku, Francesco Cerase, Luigi Corvo, Maria Cucciniello, Isabell Egger-Peitler, Paolo Fedele, Gerhard Hammerschmid, Mario Ianniello, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, Irvine Lapsley, Peter Leisink, Mariannunziata Liguori, Renate Meyer, Greta Nasi, James L. Perry, Christopher Pollitt, Adrian Ritz, Raffaella Saporito, MariaFrancesca Sicilia, Ileana Steccolini, Bram Steijn, Wouter Vandenabeele, and Montgomery Van Wart.




Reforms, Opportunities, and Challenges for State-Owned Enterprises


Book Description

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) play significant roles in developing economies in Asia and SOE performance remains crucial for economy-wide productivity and growth. This book looks at SOEs in Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, and Viet Nam, which together present a panoramic view of SOEs in the region. It also presents insights from the Republic of Korea on the evolving role of the public sector in various stages of development. It explores corporate governance challenges and how governments could reform SOEs to make them efficient drivers of the long-term productivity-induced growth essential to Asia's transition to high-income status.




Reforming State-Owned Enterprises in Asia


Book Description

This book analyzes state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which are still significant players in many Asian economies. They provide essential public services, build and operate key infrastructure, and are often reservoirs of public employment. Their characteristics and inherent competitive advantages as publicly owned enterprises allow them to play these critical roles. Their weaknesses in governance and inefficiencies in incentive structures, however, also often lead to poor performance. SOEs must be efficient, transparent, and accountable to level the playing field for private companies, secure the growth of a vibrant private sector, and achieve sustained and inclusive economic growth. This book analyzes the reform of SOEs in Asia, the results of which are mixed. The volume concludes that some key conditions generally need to be met for SOE reforms to be successful: national bureaucracies must have the capacity to implement the reforms, and adverse impacts on international trade and investment must be avoided.




Public Sector Reform


Book Description

Deregulation, privatization and marketization have become the bywords for the reforms and debates surrounding the public sector. This major book is unique in its comparative analysis of the reform experience in Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Leading experts identify a number of key factors to systematically explain the similarities and differences, map common problems and together reflect on the future shape of the public sector, exploring significant themes in a lively and accessible way.




China's State-owned Enterprises


Book Description

The Nature, the Performance, and the Reform of State-owned Enterprises provides a detailed description of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China with respect to both efficiency and income distribution. It shows that state ownership in the form of SOEs does not use resources efficiently and has a poor record in income distribution. Moreover, SOEs are found to enjoy unfair advantages in their competition with other firms. To illustrate the point, the book presents data revealing how favored policies, monopolistic powers, and subsidies benefit SOEs. These advantages are worth several trillion yuans a year. It is a sad irony that such wealth of the people is used to beef up the revenues of the SOEs, making their accounts look much better than they should be.This book, with its rich empirical data and information, is an authoritative reference for researchers interested in SOEs. It is also a good read for students of social sciences and the public to learn more about SOEs.




Alternative Paths to Public Financial Management and Public Sector Reform


Book Description

Reforming public-sector organizations--their structures, policies, processes and practices--is notoriously difficult, in rich and poor countries alike. Even in the most favorable of circumstances, the scale and complexity of the tasks to be undertaken are enormous, requiring levels of coordination and collaboration that may be without precedent for those involved. Entirely new skills may need to be acquired by tens of thousands of people. Compounding these logistical challenges is the pervasive reality that circumstances often are not favorable to large-scale reform. Whether a country is rich or poor, the choice is not whether, but how, to reform the public sector--how optimal design characteristics, robust political support, and enhanced organizational capability to implement and adapt will be forged over time. This edited volume helps address the “how†? question. It brings together reform experiences in public financial management and the public sector more broadly from eight country cases in East Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and Vietnam. These countries are at different stages of reform; most of the reform efforts would qualify as successes, while some had mixed outcomes, and others could be considered failures. The focus of each chapter is less on formally demonstrating success (or not) of specific reform, but on documenting how reformers maneuvered within different country contexts to achieve specific outcomes. Despite the great difficulty in reforming the public sector, decision-makers can draw renewed energy and inspiration, learning from those countries, sectors, and subnational spaces where substantive (not merely cosmetic) change has been achieved, and they can identify what pitfalls to avoid.




Reforming Public Enterprises


Book Description

Public enterprises reforms occupy the central place in the schemes of economic reforms in India. In many developing countries opting for economic reforms, public enterprise reforms have come at the beginning of the cycle of economic reforms. In India, it has not happened so and the results are there for us to see. The present book makes an attempt to present a case for reforming public enterprises in India and also the agenda for action for this purposes. It outlines the challenges ahead for public enterprises and the need for reforms viewed from the global perspective. It outlines the performance of the public enterprises and the areas requiring the attention of the reformers. It presents the case of a state in which reforms have to be carried out and the context for such reforms. It identifies regulations as one of the key component of the reforms. The book also elucidates the reform experience of some of the states. It presents a balanced view of the theory and practice of public enterprise management in the reform context. It incorporates case studies of nine public enterprises to demonstrate the need and effect of economic reforms.




Public Sector Reform


Book Description

The effectiveness and efficiency of a country's public sector is vital to the success of development activities, including those the World Bank supports. Sound financial management, an efficient civil service and administrative policy, efficient and fair collection of taxes, and transparent operations that are relatively free of corruption all contribute to good delivery of public services. The Bank has devoted an increasing share of its lending and advisory support to the reform of central governments, so it is important to understand what is working, what needs improvement, and what is missing. IEG has examined lending and other kinds of Bank support in 1999-2006 for public sector reform in four areas: public financial management, administrative and civil service, revenue administration, and anticorruption and transparency. Although a majority of countries that borrowed to support public sector reform experienced improved performance in some dimensions, there were shortcomings in important areas and in overall coordination. - The frequency of improvement was higher among IBRD borrowers than among IDA borrowers. - Performance usually improved for public financial management, tax administration, and transparency, but did not usually with respect to civil service. - Direct measures to reduce corruption-- such as anticorruption laws and commissions-- rarely succeeded.




Key Principles of Public Sector Reforms


Book Description

Key Principles of Public Sector Reforms contains case studies from Cameroon, Ghana, Grenada, India, Kenya, Rwanda, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania and Trinidad and Tobago on the policy reforms, strategies and methodologies that support national priorities and greater policy coherence for sustained development and growth.




Globalization and Public Sector Reform in China


Book Description

This book analyses public sector reform comprehensively in all parts of China’s public sector – government bureaucracy, public service units and state-owned enterprises. It argues that reform of the public sector has become an issue of great concern to the Chinese leaders, who realize that efficient public administration is key to securing the regime’s governing capacity and its future survival. The book shows how thinking about public sector reform has shifted in recent decades from a quantitative emphasis on 'small government', which involved the reduction in size of what was perceived as a bloated bureaucracy, to an emphasis on the quality of governance, which may result in an increase in public sector personnel. The book shows how, although Western ideas about public sector reform have had an impact, Chinese government continues to be best characterized as 'state capitalism', with the large state-owned enterprises continuing to play an important – and increasing – role in the economy and in business. However, state-owned enterprises no longer provide care for large numbers of people from the cradle to the grave – finding an alternative, efficient way of delivering basic welfare and health care is the big challenge facing China’s public sector.