ساختار بوروکراتیک و کارایی بوروکراتیک در کشورهای کمتر توسعه‌یافته

We argue that several easily identifiable structural features constitute the key ingredients of effective state bureaucracies and should help to predict ratings of bureaucratic performance: competitive salaries, internal promotion and career stability, and meritocratic recruitment. We collect a new dataset on these features for bureaucracies of 35 less developed countries. Controlling for country income, level of education, and ethnolinguistic diversity, we find that our measure of meritocratic recruitment is a statistically significant determinant of ratings supplied by two of three country risk agencies. The importance of competitive salaries and internal promotion and career stability could not be clearly established.

The important role of the quality of state institutions in the process of economic growth is being increasingly recognized in recent research. The revisionist studies of South Korea by Amsden (1989) and Taiwan by Wade (1990) brought into currency the term ‘developmental state’. The World Bank broadened the focus to state institutions in the rest of East (and Southeast) Asia in The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy (1993). The use of institutional ratings produced by country risk services for international investors permitted extension of this line of research to cross-country statistical analysis by Knack and Keefer (1995) and Mauro (1995). Indices of ‘institutional quality’ based on these ratings are now becoming standard explanatory variables in cross-country growth regressions (e.g. Rodrik, 1999, p. 86). In this paper we will be especially concerned with ratings of the performance of the central government bureaucracy. Knack and Keefer (1995) use ratings by the International Country Risk Guide (ICRG) of ‘corruption in government’ and ‘bureaucratic quality’ in one of their indices of institutional quality and use a rating by Business and Environmental Risk Intelligence (BERI) of ‘bureaucratic delays’ in the other, and Mauro (1995) uses ratings by Business International (BI) of ‘bureaucracy and red tape’ and ‘corruption’ in his index of bureaucratic efficiency. Knack and Keefer find positive and significant effects of both of their institutional quality indices on growth in per capita GDP, and Mauro finds the same for his index of bureaucratic efficiency. While the cross-country statistical evidence reinforces the idea that differential governmental performance may have an impact on economic growth, it tells us little about what kind of institutional characteristics are associated with lower levels of corruption or red tape. If the findings just listed are meaningful, it is worth identifying which characteristics of government bureaucracies lead to good ratings from the ICRG, BERI, and BI on the variables cited above.1 This is our aim in the present paper. In a companion paper (Evans and Rauch, 1999) we examine the direct impact of bureaucratic structure on economic growth. To achieve this aim required a major data collection effort. Although it is increasingly recognized that without the help of the central government bureaucracy, it is difficult if not impossible to implement or maintain a policy environment that is conducive to economic growth, this recognition has not spurred any institutional initiative to maintain a database on the characteristics of state bureaucracies. Certainly there exist many fine case studies, but to our knowledge no previous set of quantitative, internationally comparable data has been assembled on this subject. Our data collection and analysis will be guided by what we call the ‘Weberian state hypothesis’. Drawing on the original insight of Weber (1968 [1904–1911]), Evans, 1992 and Evans, 1995 argues that replacement of a patronage system for state officials by a professional state bureaucracy is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for a state to be ‘developmental’. The key institutional characteristics of what he calls ‘Weberian’ bureaucracy include meritocratic recruitment through competitive examinations, civil service procedures for hiring and firing rather than political appointments and dismissals, and filling higher levels of the hierarchy through internal promotion.2 To test the Weberian state hypothesis (actually several related hypotheses), we collected original data on various elements of bureaucratic structure for 35 countries. The next section of this paper describes our hypotheses more fully and contrasts them with other views of the determinants of bureaucratic performance. Section 3 gives the details of how we collected our data. Section 4 presents our empirical results, the robustness of which is examined in Section 5. Our conclusions and suggestions for further research are in Section 6.

Without the help of the state bureaucracy, it is difficult if not impossible to implement or maintain a policy environment that is conducive to economic growth. We have argued that several relatively simple, easily identifiable structural features constitute the key ingredients of effective state bureaucracies: competitive salaries, internal promotion and career stability, and meritocratic recruitment. We collected a new dataset on these features for the core economic agencies of 35 less developed countries. Controlling for country income, level of education, and ethnolinguistic diversity, we found that our measures of bureaucratic structure were statistically significant determinants of three out of five privately produced measures of bureaucratic performance that other studies have found to have a positive impact on economic growth. In particular, our results indicate that meritocratic recruitment is the element of bureaucratic structure that is most important for improving bureaucratic performance. Internal promotion and career stability are at best of secondary importance. Whether or not competitive salaries have any effect on bureaucratic performance is unclear. We believe these findings are an important step forwards in the effort to uncover the determinants of effective bureaucratic performance. They suggest that behavior of bureaucrats is rooted in organizational norms and structures. Whether in fact changes in organizational structure can cause changes in bureaucratic behavior might, in future work, be clarified by longitudinal analysis. Recent literature (e.g. Durand and Thorp, 1998) as well as impressionistic comments by our experts suggest important changes in bureaucratic structure were beginning to occur in a number of less developed countries in the early 1990s. This provides an opportunity to resurvey the bureaucratic structures of our sample of 35 countries focusing on the period 1990–1995, and test if changes in our bureaucratic structure indices led to significant changes in bureaucratic performance in the latter half of this decade. The usefulness of this ‘natural experiment’ clearly increases with the extent to which the administrative reforms of the early 1990s can be attributed to external pressure (e.g. from multilateral lending agencies) rather than domestic political developments. Regardless of the impetus for this wave of reform, we believe on the basis of the theory and evidence presented in this paper that institutionalization of meritocratic recruitment in particular is crucial to insure that any benefits for bureaucratic performance will outlast the pressures of the moment