Reinventing Government

I will divert briefly to Government as I am reading some excerpts from David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's book "Reinventing Government" [Osborne and Gaebler, 1992]. The book draws many of its ideas from the reforms in Britain in the 1980s and became an inspiration for the Clinton presidency. As the primary objective of political parties is to form government, we will keep these ideas in mind as we develop our own political concepts and ideology. The chief tenets are of the book are:

1. Government should concentrate on catalyzing various social and economic activities. It should steer, that is, give broad support and direction, rather than get involved in rowing, that is, in actual operations. It should steer rather than row.
2. The government should empower communities to serve themselves rather than the government itself getting involved in community service activities. The services in which community control can be especially beneficial could be health, schooling, and welfare related services.
3. The government should set out to create competition in public service delivery
   so that citizens, as customers, get the best value for money. For example, monolithic public sector organizations could be broken up into numerous units to foster competition; public services could be contracted out to the best bidder, and bidders could include public as well as private sector agencies; and an option could be given to government agencies to buy from inside the public sector or outside it. Privatization of a government activity or service could be done in such a way as to promote competition, for example, by handing it over to several parties rather than a single party.
4. The government should be transformed from being rules-driven to being mission-driven, that is, driven by a vision of excellence and a sense of mission.
5. The government should be results-oriented, and fund outcomes rather than inputs. The tendency in democratic governments is to worry about whether the budgeted expenditure is incurred or not, and whether government rules have been followed or not in incurring it. Instead, the stress should be on getting results even if it means liberalizing the budgeting rules and regulations, such as by permitting agencies to reallocate money from one head to another freely, or to carry forward the unspent balance next year without prior government approval.
6. The government should be customer-driven, meeting the needs of the citizen-customer rather than mainly the needs and requirements of the bureaucracy. This could be done through customer surveys and follow-up assessments of changes introduced as a result of such surveys, compulsory minimum contact of each staff member with the customers of the government agency or department, setting up of customer councils for feedback, of focus groups for dialog on a new service or service modification, creating electronic facilities for customers to communicate directly with an agency, customer service training for agency staff, test marketing of new services, giving of quality guarantees to customers, use of undercover inspectors to monitor public services, the setting up of efficient complaint registering and complaint tracking systems, etc.
7. The government should become more business-like, and try and earn what it spends on its various activities. Thus, its agencies should price their services rather than give them as gratis, and price them to generate a surplus. Having to support activities on their own would make these agencies value efficiency much more.
8. The government should concentrate on prevention rather than cure, and learn to anticipate problems. Governments generally tend to be reactive and that too slowly. Also, often governments undertake activities without thinking through their wider implications for pollution, environmental degradation and effects on disadvantaged groups. Anticipation of these consequences could lead to more effective plans.
9. The government should decentralize its operations and learn to get its work done through participative management and teamwork rather than hierarchically through the orders of bosses. For example, the bulk of authority over schools could be transferred from the local government to teams of principals, teachers and parents; a field laboratory to test creative ideas could be participatively setup; staff meetings could be held to brainstorm on how to rehabilitate a moribund sanitation department, etc.
10. The government should harness incentives and markets rather than controls and regulations to bring about desired changes, such as by offering guarantees for educational loans by banks to students rather than give loans itself, by creating a secondary market for housing loans, by taxing pollution at punitive rates rather than banning it, and by providing tax credits or vouchers to low income families to get [nutrition,] child care [or other benefits] from the market.

The central government's focus should be shifted from red tape to results by reinventing and redesigning government systems, agencies and programs to make them more responsive to their "customers", and to streamline the administration to make its operations cost-effective and its managers more accountable and empowered.

During the Clinton era, recommendations on the National Performance Review (NPR) task force (as the reinventing initiative was called) resulted in an estimated savings of nearly  $60 billion. Some 2000 field offices were closed and 160,000 positions were eliminated. Scores of agencies began to measure their performance, and over 200 developed and posted more than 3000 customer service standards. The federal government workforce was also cut by over 17%.

Some metrics on governance quality included among others:

• Government Effectiveness - the ability of government to pursue its priorities such as encouraging business, delivering quality public goods and services, and the control of waste in government.
• Political Stability - the absence of social unrest, radicalism and coercive governance
• Voice and Accountability - democratic functioning and the rule of law

In all, six perceived governance quality measures (affecting per capita GDP), each an aggregate of a number of sub-measures, are:

• Voice and accountability - orderly change of government, transparent and fair legal system, civil rights, political freedoms, press and media freedom, freedom from military influence, etc
• Absence of political instability and violence - absence of social unrest, coups, terrorism, civil war, armed conflict, ethnic or tribal tensions, coercive government, radicalism, etc
• Government effectiveness - pro-enterprise policies, degree of red tape and bureaucratic delays, quality and turnover of government personnel, ability to continue programs, political non-interference in public administration, quality of public goods and services, honouring of commitments by new governments, effective implementation, etc
• Reasonableness of regulatory burden - burden of regulation, degree of government intervention in the economy, wage/price controls, tariff barriers, regulations on capital flows, banking regulations, foreign trade regulations, restrictions on non-residents, barriers to entry in banking and other sectors, freedom to compete, effectiveness of anti monopoly legislation, dominance of state owned enterprises, state interference in private business, tax system, etc
• Rule of law - whether crime is properly punished, enforceability of contracts, extent of black market, enforceable rights to property, extent of tax evasion, prevalence of rule of law, police effectiveness, protection of intellectual property, independence of judiciary, ability to challenge government actions in courts, etc
• Absence of graft - absence of corruption among government political and bureaucratic officials, bribes related to securing of permits and licenses, corruption in the judiciary, corruption that scares off foreign investors, etc

Even a cursory glance indicates that we have a long way to go.
The first step in that journey is building inspirational political leadership.

REFERENCES
1. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) website.
2. Reinventing Government, Osborne and Gaebler, 1992