Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

sole employer of professional experts, most of them trained in the country of
the former colonial master. There were no other institutions that could compete.
As the sole source of knowledge it is easy for the bureaucracy to assume
that it knows best, that its experts need to be able to impose their solutions to
the various problems of development. As Smith argues (1996, p. 227):
Development planning has consequently tended to be highly centralized, technocratic and of
the ‘top down’ variety, where the experts at the top make the decisions about what the masses
need in terms of programmes of development, whether in health care, agriculture, education
or other areas of planned development. This feature of bureaucracy reflects the concept
of a specially recruited group appointed on the basis of merit to produce rational and efficient
methods of working. A system of recruitment that admits only those that can
demonstrate the required level of expertise and competence is bound to produce organizations
which lay politicians find it difficult to dominate.
Some of these problems also occur in Western countries, particularly where
bureaucracies involve technical experts. Yet these have other sources of information,
a tradition of the bureaucracy being quite firmly subservient to the
political leadership, as well as formal and informal rules to ensure ethical
behaviour. In developing countries, the bureaucracy was superior to the rest of
society. The principles of examination led to a closed bureaucracy open only to
elites, formally educated, often in the West, but operating at a remove from
their society of origin.
Public enterprise
Public Management in Developing Countries 223
In the post-independence period, government was the prime agent of economic
development, providing infrastructure, and producing goods and services,
often provided through the mechanism of the public enterprise. Developing
countries used public enterprises to a greater extent than in most Western countries.
For example, in 1977, Tanzania’s 400 state-owned enterprises accounted
for 38 per cent of gross fixed capital formation, similar to that of Ethiopia
(Jorgensen, 1990, p. 62).
Initially there were some good reasons for this greater use of public enterprise.
There was a chronic shortage of capital and capital markets such that private
ownership would necessarily mean foreign ownership. Also, in many
cases, no one from the private sector was interested in providing utility services
for nation building and for the nation to have the necessary infrastructure
it would need to be provided through the public sector. It was hard to develop
exports without adequate port facilities or rail links, while the cities required
reliable electricity supplies and telecommunication links. In addition, at the time
of decolonization, in the 1950s and 1960s, public enterprise was considered an
appropriate form of organization. This is unsurprising in view of the major role
given to public enterprise in the former colonial powers such as the United
Kingdom and France. At a time when public utilities in European countries