International Public Management Review
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Government Interference, Trust, and the Capacity to perform: Comparing Governance Institutions in Thailand
Full text linkIn this article governance institutions are compared in terms of government interference, trust in governance institutions, and the capacity of governance institutions to perform. A questionnaire was administered to find out the perception of an expert group consisting of MPA students from Chulalongkorn University. The author’s understanding about recent development of Thai politics and administration was combined into the analysis. The findings indicate that there is a high positive association between trust in governance institutions and the performance capacity of governance institutions. However, trust in governance institutions was negatively associated with government interference in governance institutions. As of this writing Thailand was experiencing a period in which citizen trust in the national government was very low. In mid-April, 2010 the Thai Election Commission ordered the ruling party to be dissolved for allegedly concealing campaign contributions. Anti-government protesters had pressed for Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's resignation for months. His coalition government was further weakened as senior military officials and leaders of other coalition parties demanded a call for elections for a new government within a short period of time
Reforming Housing Management and the Market in Ghana: The Role of Education
No full textRecent studies about housing in Ghana have shown the inadequacies of the private sector-led approach to providing affordable housing. These studies provide the basis for considering alternatives, particularly social housing. This raises two important questions, namely: (a) how to switch from a private to a social housing regime and (b) how to maintain the social housing stock if it is established. This article is concerned primarily with the latter question. It focuses on the nature of education and training and education programs for housing managers, points out an overemphasis on what is termed a "managerialist" framework in what is taught, discusses the negative effects of this approach on housing provision and the housing market in general, and recommends additional areas for consideration in the context of systemic reform
Public-Private Partnerships as Converging or Diverging Trends in Public Management? A Comparative Analysis of PPP Policy and Regulation in Denmark and Ireland
Full text linkThe utilization of the public-private partnership (PPP) model as a means of delivering various types of asset-based public services and infrastructure is often seen in academic research as part of a globally spread public management reform trend. This view is often suggested with reference to the staggering amount of attention and public money, which is now being dedicated to the formation of PPPs worldwide. This article, however, proceeds from the observation that if we look beyond the reports from a small handful of primarily Anglo-Saxon countries, which have so far attracted widespread attention in the PPP literature, we observe a much more divergent and heterogeneous pattern in various national governments’ policy and regulation for PPP and the amount of actually implemented PPP projects. By comparing the initiatives taken by the Irish government, which has embraced PPPs, with those of the Danish government, which has been PPP sceptic, the article draws on two in-depth country case studies to examine how and why PPPs developed so differently in the two countries. The research illustrates that whereas PPPs in Denmark have been subject to a loosely organized institutional framework with a number of fundamental policy and regulation issues being either unresolved or not very supportive to the uptake of PPPs, Ireland, on the other hand, now presides over one of the most ambitious PPP programs in the world, with major policy, regulation and procurement functions centralized within the Ministry of Finance and the Treasury. As research on PPPs continues to proliferate, this article illustrates that academic PPP literature would benefit from adopting a more explicit comparative focus to account for these significant comparative differences in national governments’ PPP approaches
Managing Crowd Innovation in Public Administration
Full text linkGovernments all over the world have discovered the world of social media, for better or for worse. Whereas some of them are making every effort to prevent the unhierarchical and therefore uncontrollable (dissident) opinion-forming process in Web 2.0, others are looking for ways of putting the potentialities of this new opening-up of communication to use. One approach that is increasingly being tried out is opening up innovation processes in government. However, this opening-up of innovation processes is anything but trivial. It requires a thoroughly thought-out strategy and thus confronts government systems with extensive challenges if it is not to suffer the same fate as other unsuccessful attempts at reform in the past. In our essay, we reflect on the consequences of these challenges for public managers
The Efficiency of Developing Country Public Financial Management Systems
Full text linkThe objective of this paper is to demonstrate a procedure for measuring the technical efficiency of developing country public financial management (PFM) systems using available public expenditure and financial accountability (PEFA) assessments. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to measure the relative technical efficiency of sixtynine country based PFM systems. Technical efficiency is measured as the ratio of a PFM’s PEFA score on budget credibility to it’s maximum possible score on budget credibility derived using DEA and the existing PEFA database.This measure of technical efficiency involves applying DEA to the available database of PEFA assessments to construct a hypothetical PFM system that has a higher score on budget credibility and at least identical or lower scores on the other core dimensions of PFM performance. Accordingly, the relative technical efficiency of PFM systems investigated in this article is based on the achievement of budget credibility as defined by the PEFA framework. This notion of technical efficiency is therefore quite unrrelated and distinct from the achievement of international good practice in PFM that underly the PEFA assessments. Indeed it is possible that PFM systems operating well below what public finance experts would regard as good or best international practice may achieve relatively high technical efficiency scores while others operating close to what is perceived as good or best international practice may be found to be less technically efficient.In the present database of sixty-nine PFM systems, thirteen are identified as operating at 100% technical efficiency. The DEA identifies efficiency benchmarks for the remaining less technically efficient PFM systems
Arms Trade Offsets and Cases of Corruption: The usage of anti-corruption tools in
Full text linkBecause of a lack of transparency and the high complexity of administrative processes, arms acquisition is an area with a high risk of corruption. The aim of this paper is: 1) to provide a typology of cases of corruption in compensatory trade agreements, so called arms trade offsets, that have become integral parts of most arms trades; and 2) to analyze tools possessed by government agencies concerned to prevent or detect corruption. Based on an analysis of all major English-speaking newspaper articles between 1980 and mid-2012, the results show that only a few different types of corruption typically exist in arms trade offsets. Also, the lack of transparency leads to an unusually high amount of questionable allegations. Contrary to most other scholarly articles on corruption, this paper argues that there may be no need for new and stricter anticorruption policies in this area, but that the usage of basic performance management and already existing due diligence tools could be helpful
Measuring the Capacity and Capability of Public Financial Management Systems
Full text linkThe objective of this paper is to measure the capacity and capability of public financial management (PFM) systems and to identify the resulting implications for PFM reform. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) framework and database of 69 country PFM systems to obtain estimates of PFM capacity and PFM capability. The results suggest that capacity and capability are negatively correlated. Econometric analyses of the resulting estimates of capacity and capability against PEFA core input dimensions indicate that popular interventions; such as improving budget classification schemes, introducing a multiyear perspective in budgeting, internal auditing, and other PFM reforms promoted by multilateral, bilateral and other agencies; could have differential and conflicting impacts on the capacity and capability of PFM systems. Accordingly, in order to achieve improved PFM performance, agencies may need to take account of the existing PFM capacity/ capability configuration of respective PFM systems when designing programs for PFM reform
Comment from the Editors
Full text linkThe articles in this issue are intended to be of interest to both academics and practitioners
Between New Public Management and New Public Governance: The Case of Mexican Municipalities
Full text linkIn recent years, the academic debate on the real and symbolic effects of New Public Management (NPM) has been intense. Some maintain that we are facing a new paradigm (Barzelay, 1992). Others question its significance and insist that it is only a revision of old approaches concerned with the technical qualities of public administration (Hood, 1991; Arellano, 2002). In this respect, there are those who believe that the results have been fundamentally positive, (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992) those who argue that the effects of this government reform trend are not yet clear (Lynn, 1996a, Kettl, 1999) and even that they might be questionable (Pollit, Birchall and Putnam, 1998). In this article, I intend to stimulate this discussion by arguing that the NPM is neither a positive or negative strategy by itself. It is more an approach with both achievements and failures. From my point of view it is necessary to analyze the conditions in which the potential of these types of reforms would seem to be greater, as well as those situations in which they can be innocuous or even contradictory to reform processes of other natures
The New Macroeconomics of Federal Budget Reform
Full text linkThis article provides an analysis of government finance and fiscal policy – taxing and spending – from the perspective of what is termed the new macroeconomics, a part of NIE or new institutional economics. It presents a view that is quite different from that of traditional budget-oriented thinking with respect to how we ought to analyze and measure the consequences of federal government fiscal policy and debt. The author suggests that a macroeconomic approach is more appropriate and makes more sense than traditional conceptions in terms of how we should assess the overall impact and consequences of government finance decisions