Managing the civil service : what LDCs can learn from developed country reforms

Abstract

The author examines current civil service management (CSM) practices in advanced countries to provide guidance for developing country governments that face the dilemma of how to recruit, retain, and motivate appropriately skilled staff at affordable costs, given a limited human resource base. Advanced country administrations are following two distinct paths to improving CSM. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, are engaged insweeping"managerialist"reforms to decentralize civil service functions and make them more responsive to the client public. By introducing complex financial reporting systems, managers have increased autonomy; some functions are spun off into semi-autonomous agencies operating on an increasingly commercial basis. By contrast, other industrialized countries, such as Singapore, have retained more traditional, largely centralized civil service structures, pursuing only incremental improvements in specific aspects of CSM. The author speculates about what is likely to work best in developing country administrations: Centralized civil service management models provide the best starting point for most developing countries because decentralized agency systems require technological and human resources beyond their capabilities. Some better-endowed countries could use certain agency-type features selectively. Such administrations could establish strategic plans to move toward a fuller agency system as their institutional capabilities increase. Developing countries face trade-offs in choosing which CSM functions should be strengthened first. Two functions - personnel establishment control and staff recruitment - are essential for civil service performance and should get top priority. Senior Executive Services have proved difficult to design and implement in advanced countries, but many flaws can be corrected in adapting them to developing countries, where there is often an urgent need to groom higher-level staff. Assuming minimal, essential levels of personnel establishment and budgetary control, unified pay and classification could be relaxed in developing countries, following the lead of increasing numbers of advanced countries that have done this. Given the urgency of other CSM tasks, lower priority should be assigned to reform involving performance pay, the benefits of which have yet to be demonstrated in the public sectors of developed countries. The management requirements and costs of installingperformance pay systems can be considerable and employee resistance may subvert such efforts. But performance-related promotion systems, even if imperfectly implemented, can help move developing country civil service values toward standards of competence and merit.

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