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Bureaucratic Structures and Economic Performance in Less Developed Countries
Working paper
Peter Evans, James Rauch
August 1995 |
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| This paper investigates both theoretically and empirically the possibility that policies such as internal promotion and meritocratic recruitment will tend to restrain the “predatory” tendencies of the state bureaucracy and cause government goods and services to be supplied more effectively. We collected data on these personnel practices for the core economic agencies of twenty-six less developed countries. Regression analysis shows that our measures of bureaucratic structure are statistically significant determinants of four out of six privately produced measures of bureaucratic performance, controlling for country income and human capital. The internal promotion and broader career-building elements of bureaucratic structure proved to be most important for better performance on corruption, as predicted by our theory, while for better performance regarding bureaucratic delay and red tape the meritocratic recruitment and salary elements also proved to be important. It appears that bureaucratic structure affects economic performance through bureaucratic performance rather than through some independent channel. Finally, our only disappointing result was our failure to find any effect of bureaucratic structure on the ability of the government to engage in long-term planning as proxied by the investment share of government expenditure excluding the military and education. |
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| Last updated on: 12/21/2006 |
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