Bureaucratic Reforms for Economic Prosperity
Empowering nations demands a governance that prioritises participation, responsiveness, and intelligence. A proficient bureaucracy is pivotal, ensuring policy efficacy and judicious allocation of government resources.
Bureaucracy lies at the heart of state governance. A capable bureaucracy allows for the effective implementation of policies and the judicial use of government resources.
A cross-national analysis of the effects of ‘Weberian’ State Structures on Economic Growth by Peter Evans and James Rauch (1999) highlighted that among the 35 developing countries studied, economies with more competent administrators enjoyed higher prosperity and economic growth levels.
Countries across the developed and developing world are overhauling structures and upskilling their public servants to build a well-functioning bureaucracy, that can help them achieve their economic goals.
The United Kingdom & Australia
Countries like the United Kingdom and Australia opted for the New Public Management (NPM), back in the 1980s, to make public services more ‘business-like’ and improve efficiency by using private sector management models.
The aim was to replace the struggling Traditional Public Management, based on the Weberian model, that followed a staunch hierarchical system guided by regulations and administrative procedures.
China
In countries like China, where the state acts as a “helping hand”,a series of bureaucratic transformations were brought in within the existing traditional system. Targeted administrative and fiscal decentralisation, a mandatory retirement program and permission to join private businesses, acted as incentives to support economic development in the country through public administration, within the existing political structure.
Indonesia
The reform roadmap that Indonesia adopted was built around 9 pillars.
1. Change Management
2. Legislation Management
3. Organisation Enhancement
4. Procedure Management
5. Structuring of Human Resources Management System
6. Supervision Enhancement
7. Performance Accountability Enhancement
8. Public Service Quality Improvement
9. Monitoring and Evaluation
According to Indonesia’s Ministry of Finance, they witnessed a 300% rise in government revenue in terms of taxation from the beginning of this bureaucratic reform implementation.
India
Studies in the USA, UK, Pakistan, Bolivia, the Central African Republic, Ghana, Morocco, Sri Lanka, and Tanzania have found that human resource management (including skills like communication, negotiation, flexibility, ethical actions and compassion) has a positive and significant impact on sustainable capacity building in the public sector.
Building on this, India rolled out the National Programme for Civil Services Capacity Building (NPCSCB), Mission Karmayogi, to transform the Indian bureaucracy through institutional and process reforms by partnering with public training institutions, universities, experts, and start-ups.
Read: Rethinking Leadership in The Public Sector
Establishing a participative, responsive, and intelligent governance mechanism is a need for every nation, and more so for an emerging country like India. Examples from across the world also show that bureaucratic reforms are a dynamic need and if implemented correctly, can lead to economic growth and political stability in the country.
However, implementing such reforms is a challenge. As John Maynard Keynes once said “, The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones." In a titanium framework like the public sector, there lies a tendency to resist change and continue with the status quo.
