Inter-American Development Bank
facebook
twitter
youtube
linkedin
instagram
Negocios SosteniblesCaribbean Development Trends¿Y si hablamos de igualdad?Puntos sobre la iIdeaçãoSeguridad CiudadanaSostenibilidadFactor TrabajoImpactoEnfoque EducaciónGobernarteKreatopolisPrimeros PasosCiudades SosteniblesEnergía para el FuturoGente SaludableMás Allá de las FronterasBeyond BordersIdeas MatterIdeas que CuentanAbierto al públicoMoviliblogVolvamos a la fuente Gestión fiscalHome
Citizen Security and Justice Creative Industries Development Effectiveness Early Childhood Development Education Energy Envirnment. Climate Change and Safeguards Fiscal policy and management Gender and Diversity Health Labor and pensions Open Knowledge Public management Science, Technology and Innovation  Trade and Regional Integration Urban Development and Housing Water and Sanitation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Impacto

  • HOME
  • CATEGORIES
    • Beyond development effectiveness
    • Evaluation methods and techniques
    • Measuring our performance
    • What does and doesn’t work in development
  • Authors
  • English
    • Español

Leave the bureaucrats alone?

November 19, 2013 by Francisco Mejía | Leave a Comment


A few months back we shared some disheartening results in this blog: kids didn’t improve their test scores if taught by teachers from the Kenyan Ministry of Education but did better if the teachers were managed by an NGO. Although the results were striking, the policy implications were non-starters. Even if it were politically feasible, which NGO in the World is capable of managing all of the teachers in Kenya?

.bureaucracy nigeria

So the more relevant question –from a policy perspective – is not how poorly public sector workers perform when compared with some NGOs or private sector entity. The question rather should be: Which managerial practices improve public sector delivery? The challenge is that for this very large question, we know very, very little

A new paper attempts an answer.

We have studied whether management practices for bureaucrats correlate with effective public service delivery in an important developing country context: Nigeria. We do so by combining novel project level data measuring the completion, quality and complexity of over 4700 projects implemented by various civil service organizations, with a management survey in each organization.

Our primary contribution is to provide among the first evidence on whether and how the management of bureaucrats matters for public service delivery. The relevance of such investigations is first order, given the large number of developing countries engaged in reforming public bureaucracies along the lines of the ‘good governance’ agenda of the World Bank and United Nations

[ … ]

Our findings provide support to the notion that public agencies ought to delegate some decision making to bureaucrats, relying on their professionalism and resolve to deliver public services. […]

  • a one standard deviation increase in autonomy for bureaucrats corresponds to significantly higher project completion rates of 18%;
  • a one standard deviation increase in practices related to incentives and monitoring corresponds to significantly lower project completion rates of 14%

[…]

The backdrop to these results, where 38% of projects are never started, implies there are potentially large gains to marginally changing management practices for bureaucrats.

And yes, teachers are not bureaucrats.


Filed Under: What does and doesn't work in development Tagged With: autonomy bureaucracy Civil service multi-tasking Nigeria performance evaluation

Francisco Mejía

Francisco Mejía

Francisco Mejía is a Consultant at the Office of Strategic Planning and Development Effectiveness at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Search

About this blog

This blog highlights effective ideas in the fight against poverty and exclusion, and analyzes the impact of development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Suscription

Categories

Footer

Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo
facebook
twitter
youtube
youtube
youtube

Blog posts written by Bank employees:

Copyright © Inter-American Development Bank ("IDB"). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons IGO 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives. (CC-IGO 3.0 BY-NC-ND) license and may be reproduced with attribution to the IDB and for any non-commercial purpose. No derivative work is allowed. Any dispute related to the use of the works of the IDB that cannot be settled amicably shall be submitted to arbitration pursuant to the UNCITRAL rules. The use of the IDB's name for any purpose other than for attribution, and the use of IDB's logo shall be subject to a separate written license agreement between the IDB and the user and is not authorized as part of this CC- IGO license. Note that link provided above includes additional terms and conditions of the license.


For blogs written by external parties:

For questions concerning copyright for authors that are not IADB employees please complete the contact form for this blog.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDB, its Board of Directors, or the countries they represent.

Attribution: in addition to giving attribution to the respective author and copyright owner, as appropriate, we would appreciate if you could include a link that remits back the IDB Blogs website.



Privacy Policy

Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo

Aviso Legal

Las opiniones expresadas en estos blogs son las de los autores y no necesariamente reflejan las opiniones del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo, sus directivas, la Asamblea de Gobernadores o sus países miembros.

facebook
twitter
youtube