Public Management Reform: should Latin America learn from the OECD?

Abstract

In the last twenty years both the OECD and the countries of Latin America have been preoccupied with a vision of modern techniques of public management which can deliver better, more relevant, and simply more, public services despite tight fiscal constraints. The OECD experience has been held up as a model for Latin America. OECD reforms and the rhetoric surrounding them have had a substantial impact on the discourse and decisions on reform in the countries of the region. It is therefore an appropriate moment to take a fresh look at the OECD experience and what this means for Latin America. This paper looked at the reform experience of the last two decades, first in the OECD, then in Latin America. Considering each group of countries in a structured, parallel, and self-contained way, we first looked at the pre-conditions for reform, second elicited the objectives of reform, third characterized the actual reforms undertaken, and finally made some judgments about the consequences, intended and unintended, of these reforms. The actual reforms undertaken were considered along five technical dimensions: public expenditure management, human resources management, the structure of the public sector, alternative service delivery and demand side reforms. There is no denying the diversity and specificity of national reform experiences in either region. But comparing reforms across the two groups of countries in the five technical areas, we found that for each area, there is a dominant trajectory of reform into which both groups can fit. OECD countries are typically, but not in every case, further along the trajectory than Latin American countries. Essentially, the experience of the OECD countries defines a trajectory describing successive management techniques in search of ever-greater efficiency. The logic of the trajectories for the administration of money, people, and organizations appears to reflect a move from simpler to more complex forms of control and coordination. By and large, recent OECD reforms have been driven by responsiveness and performance concerns, while the Latin American picture is more mixed. Here, due process seems to be the largest common issue. At one end of the spectrum are jurisdictions which seem able to achieve due-process only within small islands, but at the other end are jurisdictions which have begun to make progress in performance-oriented reform. Additionally, in Latin America, equity, that remained ignored for a long time, has begun to be a greater concern. Thus reform contexts between the two groups of countries are pretty different. This makes the OECD reform experience something that has to be interpreted by Latin American countries with care and selectivity.

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