Latest Resources
The Benefits of a Big Tent: Opening Up Government in Developing Countries
Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankBringing open data and open government under a single banner, Yu and Robinson argue, leads to conceptual muddling that ultimately impedes progress for both projects. They express a concern that superficial commitments to open data “can placate the public’s appetite for transparency.” Drawing on our experiences with the Kenya Open Data Initiative and the Open Government Partnership, we argue...
Una nueva generación de sistemas de evaluación de desempeño en América Central. Panoramas de un recorrido reciente
Article / Working Paper, Latin America and the Carribean, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankExamina las característica de una nueva generacíon de sistema de evaluacíon de de desempeño en América Central. Se procura identificar si los mismos han tomado elementos de un enfoque centrado en el desarrollo de las personas. El recorrido realizado es importante pero hay pendientes y desafíos con el propósito de lograr un sistema efectivamente centrado en el aprendizaje organizacional, el...
Improving the quality of governance in Poland through performance based budgeting
Article / Working Paper, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThe paper asks whether performance based budgeting (PBB) can serve as a tool for implementing the rules of good governance in Polish state administration. The authors put emphasis on analyzing de facto mechanisms of PBB implementation rather than focusing only on de jure ones. In other words, they use sociological and politological approaches combined with some insights from recent studies on...
The role of civil society in decentralisation and alleviating poverty - An exploratory case study from Tanzania
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Civil Society, Local Governance and Decentralization, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankIn many developing countries decentralisation efforts have been planned and implemented as a means to improve service delivery to all citizens, to increase citizen participation, and to improve good governance at the sub-national level. However, until recently, poverty reduction has not been a central feature of decentralisation measures until recently. Donors have begun to realise the...
Accountability in the Provision of Social Services: A Framework for African Research
Article / Working Paper, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankGlobally, there appears to be surprisingly little relationship between government expenditure on basic services and the actual level of service delivery. This suggests that there are potentially severe problems in getting good value for money which are better tackled in some countries than in others. How do recipients of a service get good value from providers? For most services the...
Стратегии институциональных реформ: Китай и Россия (Institutional Reform Strategies: China and Russia)
Article / Working Paper, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and CIS, Justice, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThis is the second part of the work devoted to the problem of the choice of institutional reform strategies. In the first part a concept of a promising trajectory was introduced. This is a trajectory that has good chances to be successful since it meets a number of requirements; their list was discussed in detail. In this paper, proposed analytical tools are used to compare reforms in Russia and...
An Empirical Study of Corruption in Ports
Africa, Article / Working Paper, Corruption, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankWe generate an original dataset on bribe payments at two competing ports in Southern Africa that allows us to take an unusually close look at the relationship between bureaucratic organization, bribe-setting behavior and the costs corruption imposes on users of public services. We find that the way bureaucracies are organized can generate different opportunities for bureaucrats to engage in...
A Panel Study on the Relationship Between Corruption and Government Size
Article / Working Paper, Corruption, Democracy, Parliament, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankUsing panel data from 1996 to 2005, this paper shows that the effect of government size on corruption is positive at a low level of democracy, but it is negative at a high level. This finding could fill the gaps in previous studies whose findings on the relationship between corruption and government size are controversial. The results on the effect of government size on...
Public Investment and Corruption in an Endogenous Growth Model
Article / Working Paper, Corruption, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankHigh capital spending is favored by economists and politicians for its beneficial effects on economic growth. However, there is empirical research associating high levels of public investment with low economic growth due to corruption. In this article, Simge Tarhan provides an endogenous growth model with Ramsey taxation that is consistent with this empirical finding. In the model,...
Comparing quantitative results from three different methods: do they tell the same story?
Article / Working Paper, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Carribean, Local Governance and Decentralization, Public Administration, Academic/Think TankThis Briefing Note from Oxford Policy Management explores the experience from two studies in the Maldives and in Jamaica. In both studies a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods was used, linked by a scorecard approach. By ‘scorecard’ we refer to a set of questions that is the same in the focus groups and the quantitative interviews. Using the results from...