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Public Sector Reform: What Works and Why? An IEG evaluation of World Bank SupportThe World Bank support for public sector reform has grown notably in recent years. To address the questions of what is working and why in this area, the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) has examined Bank lending and other support for public sector reform in four areas: public financial management, administrative and civil service, revenue administration, and anticorruption and transparency. A majority of countries that borrowed to support public sector reform improved their performance in some dimensions, but there were shortcomings in important aspects. Middle-income borrowers saw improvements in their public sector quality more frequently than low-income borrowers, even though the low-income group usually had greater needs for public sector improvement. Performance usually improved for public financial management, tax administration, and transparency, but not for civil service. Direct measures to reduce corruption, such as anticorruption laws and commissions, rarely succeeded, as they often lacked the necessary support from political elites and the judicial system.
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Making Public Sector Reforms Work : Political and Economic Contexts, Incentives, and StrategiesSupporting effective public sector reform is a major challenge that the World Bank and other agencies and stakeholders have been grappling with. It is increasingly recognized that political economy factors play a crucial role. However, beyond this broad proposition, specific questions arise: What country contexts are more/less propitious for public sector reforms and what reforms are likely to succeed where? And can more explicitly taking political economy challenges into account help to pursue public sector reforms even in less propitious contexts? This paper addresses these issues in two ways: first, it draws on the existing literature to identify key propositions about factors that can trigger or facilitate public sector reforms, and those that tend to work against (successful) reforms. Second, it investigates the experience of World Bank public sector operations over the decade 2000-2010. It finds that governments in many developing countries face incentives to initiate public sector reforms, but that at the implementation stage, political costs frequently outweigh potential gains; and hence reforms are abandoned or left to wither. Real breakthroughs have been achieved in countries experiencing major structural shifts and those having political leadership committed to higher-level goals. The review of operations shows that successful projects are significantly more widespread than the literature would lead to assume. Furthermore, it provides tentative evidence that investing in understanding political economy drivers has been associated with better project performance. Key implications are the need to differentiate between country contexts more clearly ex ante, concentrate more on reform implementation during windows of opportunity that are typically of limited duration, and design reforms with a clear plan of engagement with stakeholder incentives.
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Public Financial Management Reform in the Middle East and North Africa : An Overview of Regional ExperienceOne of the most important functions that governments perform is mobilizing financial resources and deploying them to achieve their objectives. According to the most recent World Bank data, governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region spent approximately US$407 billion dollars in 2007 in delivering their policy, regulatory and service functions. This report is divided into two volumes. The first volume summarizes the results and presents the conclusions of this analysis. The second provides the individual economy case studies and templates upon which many of these conclusions are based. This report seeks to reflect upon this experience and better understand the nature of the Public Financial Management (PFM) challenges confronting the economies of the MENA region. Turning to the substance of these reforms, it asks where are they performing well and where are they struggling? To what extent are these economies dealing with common problems stemming from similar administrative traditions and comparable levels of development, or unique challenges grounded within their own particular historical or bureaucratic experience? The analysis also seeks to understand the type of PFM reforms that have been implemented across the region in the last decade, including where these reforms have gone well, where they have not, and why.