(bright music)
- A lot of what came to be
defined as civil service reform
is also very much about
the fiscal aspects of what
was called establishment management.
You're thinking about
improving the civil service,
the core government functions.
In many countries where the human resource
endowment is quite weak, capacity is low,
broadly in the society at large.
How does government or
how does the civil service
itself become an engine
for development if in fact
it's plagued by the same kinds of problems
that the country is at large.
The basic thrust of these
pay and employment reforms
we're trying to correct public
pay and employment syndrome.
Nobody really knew how
many people were working
in government.
The establishment-controlled mechanisms
were completely out of whack,
the payroll was filled with ghost workers.
A lot of these reforms
that the bank was promoting
had to do with installing
formal, transparent
procedures, often exams.
It's not about the job you do.
It's not about the function
that you're carrying out.
Pay and employment rationalization reforms
were undertaken largely
in the beginning through
these structural adjustment programs
which were on a short leash.
The money would be deposited directly
and immediately into the treasury.
It wasn't just the pay
and employment reforms
that had a hard time, it was also some of
these attempts to introduce
merit-based practice
in client governments.
Almost every one of these
reforms found was that
civil service part of the
new public management agenda
was hollow, again, it
might have been formal
but it wasn't really followed in reality.
One thing is just about
aid and the aid model.
What happens often is that those projects
siphon off the best
people from governments.
These projects are basically poaching
people from the civil service.
Either would-be civil
servants or civil servants
who have just had it and decide to go work
for an aid project itself.
Donors have a collective action problem.
What was really difficult
were the politics
and resistance and
opposition to a lot of the
reforms that were going to be resulting in
winners and losers.
The pretty profound debate that has been
raging about whether the
clients of the World Bank
that have been the
recipients of these kinds of
reform investments are ready.
I mean that sounds a bit condescending,
and I think there's always a push-back
on the part of countries that,
why should we adopt these Western systems.
What I think would be useful to do is to
establish some kind of
comparative data framework
so that we can start to
think about performance
in a more rigorous way.
Instead of going into their own projects,
they could pool their funds
and send it right into
the budget so that they're
actually supporting
the institutions, civil
service institutions
and others in the country context.
