Authorized Authorized

170 WORLD DEVELOPMENT REPORT 2016
Figure 3.13 Government officials in Indonesia and the Philippines have generally
low opinions of human resource management practices
a. Indonesia b. Philippines
Your ministry easily recruits
high-quality staff
The best and brightest join
the private sector
Your coworkers are not
productive at work
Promotions are based
on merit
Underperformers are
routinely disciplined
Most people in other
departments can be trusted
You recommend jobs in your
department to friends and family
Your coworkers are
not productive at work
Promotions are based on
politics rather than merit
Underperformers are
routinely disciplined
Most people in other
departments can be trusted
0 25 50 75 100 0 25 50 75 100
Percent of respondents
Percent of respondents
Disagree or strongly disagree Neither Agree or strongly agree
Sources: World Bank surveys of government officials, 2011 and 2013. Data at http://bit.do/WDR2016-Fig3_13.
Note: The survey in Indonesia was conducted in 2011 and covered about 3,000 government officials; the survey in the Philippines was done in 2013 and covered
2,500 officials.
more structured performance management practices
are more profitable, and digital technologies complement
performance monitoring and performance
incentives. 43 Goal-setting and performance incentives
are difficult—but not impossible—in government
bureaucracies. The multiple demands on a public organization,
and the multiple interests it needs to serve,
make it difficult to define goals, and performance
incentives can trigger a host of perverse incentives.
The key variable is the extent to which the tasks and
outputs of agencies can be routinized and monitored. 44
As MajiVoice and the EDE Este feedback systems
show, eliciting citizen feedback on service quality,
tracking complaint resolution, producing audit trails
of worker effort, and offering performance incentives
for staff can be a powerful combination for transforming
government bureaucracies. This combination
is also being used in one-stop service centers in
many countries.
Digitally enabled performance monitoring is much
more difficult for services that are highly discretionary
and hard to monitor, such as teaching and curative
health care, and for policy and regulatory functions.
Assessing performance is necessarily more subjective
and therefore conditional on the quality of manage-
ment and level of trust in an organization—which can
take years to build. There is little evidence, even in the
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development) countries, that digital technologies
have made any fundamental differences in the way
government bureaucracies are managed, particularly
for the better integration of policy making and service
delivery across government. Even in New Zealand,
known for its highly competent and innovative public
administration, two-thirds of public officials surveyed
were skeptical that digital technologies would induce
greater collaboration and integration across government
departments because the notion of a “joined-up
government” conflicted with the annual agency-based
budget appropriation process. 45
In sum, these digitally enabled management
improvements are isolated examples. Either they are
pilots and experiments limited to a subset of activities,
such as addressing absenteeism, that form the basic
minimum required to improve teaching or health care,
or they are limited to a few locales, sectors, or agencies
and not taken to scale in the government as a whole.
Developing country government bureaucracies now
have a digital veneer over a largely unchanged structure,
culture, and performance orientation.