Bureaucracy

The rise of the institutions and state capacity paradigms in economics has brought bureaucratic effectiveness to the forefront of the debate on how to foster economic growth and development. While there is little disagreement that effective public administration is central to economic development, the debate around identifying the building blocks of an effective and competent bureaucracy continues. As a result there is a growing appetite for opening the black box of bureaucracies and understanding the formation, governing rules and continued transformation of effective bureaucracies. 

This VoxDevLit explores this issue, taking stock of how far we understand the building blocks needed to strengthen the administrative capacity of the state. This is important, since a well-functioning state can play a role in encouraging growth and poverty reduction while preserving basic liberties and expanding access to public goods and services. We will review the emerging literature on bureaucracy and development, organising the review along the key drivers of bureaucrat effectiveness: (i) improving performance through incentives; (ii) through better selection; and (iii) through a better matching of bureaucrats to tasks. We end by discussing where gaps in our knowledge remain.

Bureaucracy: Presentation of key takeaways

For our launch event, Guo Xu joined us to present the key takeaways from this VoxDevLit, highlighting policy relevant results from recent economic research on bureaucracy.

The initial version of this VoxDevLit is based on Besley, Burgess, Khan and Xu (2022), “Bureaucracy and Development”, Annual Review of Economics, vol. 14, 2022, pp. 397-424. We thank Amol Singh Raswan for the excellent research assistance.