The development value proposition of consultants

The NYT had this takedown of McKinsey accusing it of shoring up the stature of authoritarian governments and indulging in dubious business practices.

Now Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution springs to the support with this article. He writes,

One of the biggest, most positive (and most neglected) global trends over the last 30 years has been the spread of managerial and technocratic expertise to what used to be called “third world governments.” In most countries, the central banks, the public health authorities, the treasuries and many other public-sector institutions now collect good data, hire Western-educated advisers, and try to implement good solutions. This is true in both the democracies and most of the autocracies, with North Korea a notable exception. Although there is still a long way to go, this spread of technocracy has helped bring amazing increases in life expectancy and declines in child poverty, while making the world far wealthier and freer... these developments are what McKinsey stands for and has tried to accomplish, and any highlighting of the negative should be counterbalanced by this positive trend.

Well, this is a teachable moment in terms of regurgitation of an entrenched narrative. Talk about evidence-free claims. Where is the evidence that the public bureaucracies in developing countries have internalised some new expertise which has contributed to their achievements? Where is the evidence that it is this "managerial and technocratic expertise" that has contributed significantly to all that great progress? Even assuming the value of such expertise, where is the evidence that they have seeped into public bureaucracies from management consultants? 

In countries like India, where consultants nowadays roam around freely across government corridors dispensing largely spurious damaging wisdom, I am inclined to think that the net balance is now increasingly negative. Sample this on their impact on international development.

Update 1 (23.04.2020)

FT has this article about the rise of consulting services within government. This story of passport service outsourcing is perhaps less a success of consulting than of policy reform and work-flow engineering,

Obtaining an Indian passport was once notoriously complex, with applicants forced to wait several weeks or months and fight through a maze of bureaucracy. In 2008, that began to change when the government handed Tata Consultancy Services a mandate to overhaul the country’s passport system and operate a new network of passport issuance centres. Today, citizens can be issued a passport within three days after a simple online application and a visit to one of 88 application centres, run by TCS alongside the government. At these centres, private employees collect biometric data and carry out document checks before passing applications to public servants for approval.