I blogged here about the importance of strong public oversight and in-house expertise for the successful execution and management of infrastructure projects.
Mainstream development discourse focuses disproportionately on institutional and systemic challenges, and overlooks the important role played by individual officials in effective public services delivery and the realisation of policy outcomes.
Specifically, I am referring to the commitment and expertise of individual public servants in important positions at all levels of the government. By important, I’m not confining to leadership positions, but any position where they can make significant contributions to influence the agenda.
The importance of individual officials in the success of development interventions is generally overlooked amidst systemic and institutional factors. This also comes from the belief that the success of development interventions is determined by good ideas, comprehensive planning, and rigorous monitoring. This theory of change overlooks the reality that successful development interventions tend to emerge iteratively over the course of their implementation. Such iteration, in turn, requires capable and committed leadership, especially important given weak state capabilities.
In fact, it is no exaggeration to argue that capable, proficient, and committed officials are perhaps the most important ingredient of state capability.
The importance of capable individual officials is also borne out by academic research. I blogged here, drawing attention to the work of Philipp Barteska and Jay Euijung Lee, who examined the impact of the bureaucratic capabilities (of export promotion officers) on the effectiveness of industrial policy in terms of export performance in South Korea. They found the following:
We exploit the three-yearly rotation of managers of South Korea’s export promotion offices in 87 countries between 1965 and 2000 to show that a one standard deviation increase in bureaucrat ability boosts exports by 37%. Under higher-ability bureaucrats, South Korean exports respond more strongly to a country’s import demand, suggesting a more effective transmission of market information.
An increase in exports by nearly two-fifths with just one standard deviation increase in bureaucratic capability tells us that the quality of officials might matter more than (or at least as much as) fiscal incentives and regulatory changes in trade promotion efforts.
Alessandra Fenizia studied the impacts of managers in the public sector in Italy using a dataset containing an output-based measure of productivity.
Exploiting the rotation of managers across sites, I find that a one standard deviation increase in managerial talent raises office productivity by 10%. These gains are driven primarily by the exit of older workers who retire when more productive managers take over. I use these estimates to evaluate the optimal allocation of managers to offices. I find that assigning better managers to the largest and most productive offices would increase output by at least 6.9%.
Cristobal Otero and Pablo Munoz study government managers in public health provision in Chile.
Using novel data from public hospitals in Chile, we document that top managers (CEOs) account for a significant amount of variation in hospital mortality. We then use a staggered difference-in-differences design, and show that a reform which introduced a competitive selection system for recruiting CEOs in public hospitals reduced hospital mortality by approximately 8%. The effect is not explained by a change in patient composition and is robust to several alternative explanations. The financial incentives included in the reform—performance pay and higher wages—do not explain our findings. Instead, we show that the policy changed the pool of CEOs by displacing older doctors with no management training in favor of younger CEOs who had studied management. The mortality effects were driven by hospitals in which the new CEOs had managerial qualifications. These CEOs improved operating room efficiency and reduced staff turnover.
Michael Carlos Best, Jonas Hjort, and David Szakonyi analyse data on public procurements in Russia and find the value of bureaucratic effectiveness.
Using data on 16 million public purchases in Russia, we show that 39 percent of the variation in prices paid for narrowly defined items is due to the individual bureaucrats and organizations who manage procurement. Low-price buyers also display higher spending quality. Theory suggests that such differences in effectiveness can be pivotal for policy design.
R D Metcalfe, A B Sollaci, and C Syverson
In this setting, managers move between stores but management practices are set by firm policy and largely fixed, allowing us to hone in on managers’ personal roles in determining store performance. We find: (i) managers affect and explain a large share of the variance of store-level productivity; (ii) negative assortative matching between managers and stores, which may reflect both firms’ decisions and a selection-driven bias that we characterize and argue might apply in other settings using movers designs; (iii) managers who move do so on average from less productive to more productive stores; (iv) female managers are less likely to move stores than male managers; (v) manager quality is generally hard to explain with the observables in our data, but is correlated with the ratio of full-time to part-time workers; (vi) managers who obtain high labor productivity also tend to obtain high energy productivity, revealing some breadth in managers’ skills applicability; (vii) high-performing managers in stable growth times are also high-performing during turbulent times; and (viii) exogenous productivity shocks improve the quality of initially low quality managers, suggesting managers can learn. We explain implications of these findings for productivity research.
Ricardo Dahis, Laura Schiavon, and Thiago Scot investigated the performance of state judges in Brazil.
We investigate this question focusing on state judges in Brazil. Exploring monthly data on judicial output and cross-court movement, we estimate that judges account for at least 23% of the observed variation in number of cases disposed. With novel data on admission examinations, we show that judges with higher grades perform better than lower-ranked peers. Our results suggest competitive examinations can be an effective way to screen candidates.
On a slightly different note, Kevin Hawickhorst shows how technical expertise built up within public systems in the US allowed for the nurturing and flourishing of capable officials, created public confidence, and thereby enhanced the credibility of governments.
However, over time, expertise has come to be crowded out due to the conscious shift in the way government bureaucracies came to be organised.
At the turn of the twentieth century, agencies followed a distinct blueprint: they were organized by subject matter, not by abstract function. Each bureau focused on a single domain—such as soils, mines, or forests—and combined research, regulation, and grants under one roof. In the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Bureau of Entomology, for example, studied insect-borne diseases, issued rules to contain them, and funded farmers to protect their crops, all as part of a single mission. This structure helped agencies recruit experts by offering broader, more meaningful work than corporations could, and it built a shared sense of mission rooted in a vocational community.
Today’s agencies look very different. After World War II, reformers dismantled the integrated subject matter bureaus and reorganized government along what they called “functional” lines. In this system, regulation is one bureau, research another, and grant administration still another; each bureau covers a wide range of subjects and is defined by its activity rather than its mission. It is the model we now take for granted. The Bureau of Entomology is gone, and USDA now houses all agricultural research in a single unit. New agencies were built this way from the outset: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, created in 1965, was designed as a grantmaking machine, never a vocational community.
The shift was a well-intentioned one and backed by a wide coalition of reformers, businessmen, and interest groups. Functional departments looked modern, rational, and efficient: they simplified charts, tightened chains of command, and promised to reduce duplication. But what seemed like sensible reform gradually hollowed out the structures that had made expertise durable. Once government agencies lost their vocational missions, they stopped drawing on networks of expertise and started looking like paper mills, less able to command political respect, and more vulnerable to capture and drift… logic of the Progressive-era model: that research and administration had to remain intertwined within a unified mission if expertise was to thrive.
However, this wealth of internal technical expertise has, over time, given way to the tribe of generalist managers.
The core mistake was a shift in what we thought expertise was. The Progressive reformers built vocations that were tied to missions, visible to the public, and legible to politicians. Their successors redefined expertise as a credential: the knowledge of process rather than mastery of a craft. To businessmen and academic reformers alike, competence meant general managerial skill, not professional vocation. As this view took hold within the bureaucracy, “expertise” came to mean knowing the procedures rather than knowing the work. We have traded the civil engineer and the entomologist for the program analyst, the management consultant, and the diversity officer—experts who know how to manage the process but not how to do the work.
This redefinition of expertise hollowed out our idea of representation. We now equate representation with participation and diversity, as if the state were legitimate only when citizens can see themselves in its officials. The Progressives, by contrast, recruited from the country’s varied vocations and made that work visible to the nation. Expertise was representative not because it resembled the public but because it served the public, visibly and competently… Their institutions were built to make expertise endure, by recruiting promising candidates from vocational schools and professional societies, dressing them in uniform, and sending them to work alongside state engineers, agricultural agents, and university researchers…
The Navy cannot build ships. In 1940, faced with the same problem, Congress did the obvious: it created a Bureau of Ships, put engineers in charge, and got ships built. That bureau is gone, and we treat its return as unthinkable. Yet the remedy remains the same. If we want ships, we should once again have a Bureau of Ships to build them… Repairing our institutions will ultimately require returning to the vocational conception of expertise… We have built institutions that valorize process in place of vocation, producing a bureaucracy that neither embodies skill nor commands respect. What matters now is not saving “expertise” in the abstract but rebuilding the institutions where it can serve visibly and credibly.
Hawickhorst’s essay points to several individual public leaders in the US who built institutions and brought credibility and confidence in public agencies through their careers - George Uhler (headed Steamboat Inspection Service for 20 years from 1903), Logan Page (Office of Public Roads, founded in 1905), Joseph Kinyoun (headed the Hygienic Laboratory, a precursor to the National Institutes of Health), and Gifford Pinchot (founded the Forest Service). Every country has such leaders across levels.
In their search for better outcomes in public policy, governments tend to expend effort and resources on interventions involving financial support, regulatory enablers, and technology adoption, while overlooking personnel choices. This bias is also reflected in public commentary and academic research that shapes public narratives.
However, as the case of the South Korean export promotion officers starkly demonstrates, for governments intent on reform and impact, personnel choice decisions may be the lowest-hanging fruit. In most policy areas, the range between the opportunity cost of a bad personnel choice and that of a capable personnel choice may be much greater than that for any other policy intervention.
The private sector addresses the issue of the importance of capable individuals by incentivising them with extrinsic material motivations like financial rewards and fast-tracked promotions. While neither of these instruments is available to governments, it can appeal to the intrinsic motivation of public-spirited officials.
This would require acknowledging capabilities and merit (as borne out strictly by performance track record, not merely in some narrow quantitative sense). This requires differentiating capable bureaucratic leaders from their larger peer group by entrusting them with higher responsibilities, appointing them to identified important positions, drawing on their expertise in various forms, recognising their work through different non-financial channels, and generally signalling their differentiation.
An explicitly professed intent, let alone a rigorously implemented process, that seeks to differentiate among officials at all levels, can be a powerful force to shape expectations and align incentives within public systems.
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