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This article offers a discursive analysis of the Conservative green paper for international development, published as part of the closely fought election campaign of 2010 that culminated in a UK coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. The article examines the paper in comparison with the discursive shifts represented by the first Department for International Development (DfID) white paper, published by the outgoing Labour administration in 1997. In contrast with the optimistic and globalist developmentalism that characterised Labour's development discourse, the green paper sounds a more cautious note, using empire to focus on Britain's leadership role in poverty alleviation rather than on global progress, and brings back the full force of developmentalism only at the point where it seeks to legitimate spending on security concerns as a development concern. The article then moves on to examine the green paper's most explicit discursive move, the signalling of a 'post-bureaucratic age'. This move towards increased information provision to promote transparency and accountability is likely to signal greater control by powerful donors in securitised times, albeit with a potential re-scaling of responsibility for poverty alleviation to the poorest local communities. Finally, the article looks briefly at information technologies in relation to the transnational spatiality of civil society, arguing that attention needs to be paid to the more embodied forms of transnational association encouraged by the green paper, and to the selection and impacts of information, which need to be seen in the discursive context of wider Conservative constructions of the 'big society'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing realization that state capacity is a fundamental ingredient for effective governance, and is a crucial element of long-run economic development. This paper offers an overview of the strengths and limitations in current empirical research on the measurement of state capacity. The paper also surveys the fast emerging literature on the determinants and effects of state capacity. We argue that existing measures on governance quality used in cross-national research can be usefully exploited to capture different aspects of state capacity, and show that post the end of the Cold War, developing economies have experienced improvements in legal, administrative and bureaucratic capacity, but the gap with advanced economies is still wide. Future research should address the short temporal coverage of available measures of state capacity, as well as providing a systematic quantitative assessment of the determinants of capacity and of its effects on development outcomes, such as health and education, which have not received sufficient scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and when do international norms shape or fail to shape a state's behaviors? This paper examines how and why South Korea decided to accede to the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development's (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in 2008. Specifically, we examine the political infighting that shaped the timing and implementation of the decision. Our study highlights what we term a "bureaucratic norm contestation process" whereby government agencies independently select norms to promote based on their organizational interests and engage in intra‐governmental debates as they competitively attempt to "sell" their choice to decision‐makers. In the case of South Korea, this aggressive reinterpretation of norms, in conjunction with pushback by rival bureaucratic agencies, has contributed to two translations of the norm. The first translation was a discursive shift of the language of donorship away from a focus on humanitarian duty and towards status enhancement. The second translation occurred at the level of practice, as rival bureaucracies tried to implement their unique vision of Korea's success story. This study illustrates that norm diffusion is not a unidirectional flow of ideas from the center to the periphery of the international system but a process of contested coproduction that includes local actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows evidence of strong heterogeneity in the relationship between government size and growth, depending on the quality of public sector institutions. Focusing on a wide sample of developed and developing countries over the period 1981-2005, we find that government size reduces growth when bureaucracy quality is low, whereas no significant effect is observed for sufficiently high levels of bureaucracy quality. The results hold both in cross-section and panel data analyses and are robust to a large number of robustness checks. These findings have important implications for assessing the role of government size in economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether the probability of being punished after losing power leads dictators to restrain their level of predation and, thus, increase economic growth. To do so, a simple model of predatory rule is developed, and the consequences of an increasing probability of punishment after loosing power explored. New data on dictators' post-exit fate have permitted to estimate the predicted probability of punishment taking place by using multinomial logit. Outgoing dictators' strength and the international context are shown to be the main determinants of post-exit scenarios. The probability of punishment is proven to have a positive and significant effect on the rate of growth of GDP under alternative specifications of growth regressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of "neoutiliarian" paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as "predatory "and "rent seeking." This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The "incoherent absolutist dominationt' of the "klepto-patrimonial" Zairian state are contrasted to the "embedded autonomy" of the East Asian developmental state, Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state - Brazil - are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of Institutionalized links to private elites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times there have been a proliferation of national, sectoral and local development policies on poverty eradication in the developing countries. This study of the Jamaican poverty reduction initiative aimed to find out whether some of these programmes have transcended some of the elementary policy problems that have been widely covered in the development management literature since the 1960s. The Government of Jamaica contends that its overall social policy, and especially the National Poverty Eradication Programme (NPEP), instituted from 1997–2000 may have contributed towards the reduction of absolute poverty levels that have been recorded in the last half-decade. This writer argues otherwise. This is because a close examination of the management of the NPEP per se revealed deep-seated problems. These included a weak political analysis, poor co-ordination at the macro and street levels and a lack of adequate institutional support from the bureaucracy. The essay suggests ways towards improved governance. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on economic development in Japan. Participation in world trade in manufactures; Speed of movement to the high technology end of international trade; Distinctive role of the state; Linking of economic achievement to broader social goals; Preservation of traditional mission of the bureaucracy.

Although many studies have analyzed the behavior of high‐skilled migration to the United States, few have focused on the escalating migration of Mexican entrepreneurs, and particularly on the determinants of this kind of high‐skilled migration. This article addresses this gap through a qualitative approach conforming to quantitative procedures, based on 20 in‐depth interviews applied to Mexican entrepreneurs working and/or living in the United States. Theoretically, a mixed‐embeddedness approach guides this research because it allows examining both the individual characteristics of Mexican entrepreneurs, and the influence of the home and host countries' institutional contexts on their business endeavors. Findings revealed Mexico's institutional weaknesses, such as insecurity, corruption, and bureaucracy, are important drivers of migration but so are the perception of a friendly U.S. fiscal system, the search for a better quality of life, and the appeal of a more transparent business environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of resilience is rapidly gaining influence in public administration practice and research, but a more comprehensive resilience research agenda in public administration is yet to emerge. This article aims to clarify how experiences and potential contributions from social-ecological resilience research can inform resilience studies in public administration. By contrasting key components of the resilience paradigm and its policy prescriptions with established findings from public administration research, a set of key shortcomings of social-ecological resilience thinking are identified: (1) deterministic systems models; (2) simplified accounts of politics and policy; and (3) a lack of systematic and generalizable empirical studies. To avoid these shortcomings, it is suggested that public administration resilience studies should explore multiple and competing models for how resilience can be generated; analyse trade-offs between resilience and other values of public administration; avoid systems theoretical resilience models; and apply the notion of resilience in areas beyond crisis management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities need law to thrive, but it is not clear how abstract texts become tangible policy outcomes. Existing research on the role of law in urban affairs conceives law as either an algorithm that shapes urban life or a reflection of political disputes. The former assumes that the meaning of law is obvious; the latter claims it is irrelevant. In contrast to these views, I argue that laws are multipurpose instruments that acquire a specific function when enforced by those government agents who operate at the frontlines of public service. To understand what these agents do and why, I conducted a qualitative study of the Ministério Público and the Defensoria Pública in São Paulo, Brazil. Through this process, I found that these government agencies are not cohesive bureaucracies but heterarchies composed of distinct internal factions with different evaluative principles. Moreover, officials within them are not isolated from other entities in society but tightly entangled with them, and these connections influence what these officials do. Finally, enforcement agents are not always resigned to solving conflicts as they arise. Rather, they strive to find acceptable solutions in the interstices of existing conditions or even change the circumstances that created the conflict in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This article explores transformations of development practice after economic reforms, through an empirical account from Gujarat, western India - the country's poster-state of neoliberal reforms. It draws upon ethnographic fieldwork on the Hariyali watershed development intervention and the delivery of state-sponsored microcredit through the Swarnajayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana programme in Dahod district, eastern Gujarat. This study of development practice reveals the ascendancy of market rationalities in development agencies; the rise of contracting and subcontracting by a restructured rural bureaucracy; the state's devolution of policy implementation to local political actors; and the deployment of self-governance techniques, specifically notation and inscription technologies, to create self-regulating development subjects. Springing from transformations within the state itself, these changes constitute fundamental shifts in the governance of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban-rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978-1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public-private sector mobility among party officials. County and township-level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private-sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter-provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra-institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra-institutional policy innovations in transitioning states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State building is considered to be the solution to Afghanistan's ills. State-building efforts largely aim to mirror Afghanistan to a market democracy. However, a market democracy is the outcome of specific historical and geo-graphical circumstances, and cannot be replicated easily. This article explores four models of state formation: the Western, developmental, rentier and predatory state. Afghanistan can be characterized as a weak rentier state, subsisting on aid. Generally, the structural consequences of such aid rentierism are underestimated. 'State building' in this context cannot be successful. More aid 'ownership' and a strengthening of the Afghan bureaucracy will simply consolidate aid rentierism rather than reverse-engineer a market democracy. A greater focus on economic policy is required to direct Afghanistan's rulers towards a more viable path of state formation. In this regard, the 'developmental state' offers some insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently the impact of institutional factors on macro variables has been gaining momentum. Researchers have investigated the impact of corruption, law and order, and bureaucracy on economic growth, inflation, investment, productivity, and the real exchange rate. In this article, we investigate empirically the impact of institutional factors on the black market premium. In many developing nations, because of government restrictions on capital and trade flows, there exists a black market for foreign exchange. By using data from 60 developing countries over the 1982-1995 period, we show that the black market premium is higher in countries that are plagued by more corruption. This finding seems to be insensitive to five different measures of corruption as well as whether cross-section or panel data are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to answer the following question: When did Swedish bureaucracy arise? That is, to determine a point in time when the organizational technology that Weber called bureaucracy became dominant in the process of Swedish state formation, as well as when bureaucracy finally replaced the feudal form of government based on the authority of nobility and the hierarchical ties of individual loyalties. The importance of this question relates to the debate on the sequential logic of economic and political development. The change from an aristocratic/particularistic to a bureaucratic/universal state apparatus can be understood as a change from despotic to infrastructural state power. Most empirical material indicates that, in terms of institutional structure, the transition to a bureaucratic administration started in the 1850s. Contrary to what most Swedish historians have argued, the Swedish state remained feudal and particularistic all they way up to the mid-19th century. If any particular decade is key to this transformation, it would be the 1870s. By then the last of the noble privileges had disappeared, a uniform salary system had been introduced, and the various state apparatuses had begun reorganizing toward a higher level of efficiency and rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Stagnation and a failure to break out of a subsistence-oriented type of production continue to characterize the agricultural sector in Western Samoa. The lack of dynamism in agriculture has variously been ascribed to subsistence affluence and limited wants, the inhibiting impact of fa'asamoa - the Samoan way of life - and, more recently, to the effects of migration, remittances, aid and bureaucracy on economic development. This article suggests that the explanatory power of these factors by themselves is unsatisfactory. Instead, it argues that an absence of secure market outlets offering predictable and sufficiently attractive prices to farmers and the lack of rural-urban links in general are at the heart of the problem. The economy seems to be caught in a vicious circle where farmers fail to commit themselves to production for the market because of a lack of secure outlets, while adequate downstream distribution and processing channels do not develop for lack of secure supplies. The interchangeable nature of commercial and subsistence production in agriculture, widespread access to overseas remittances, and the smallness of the domestic economy serve to perpetuate the deadlock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite some important similarities, capitalism's informal economy and socialism's second economy are not functional equivalents or structural counterparts. An informal economy is the product of efforts to circumvent accountability to the explicit rationalizations of regulatory bureaucratization. It operates according to principles disparate from those of the rules of internal labor markets but congruent with the market principles that coordinate the formal economy. In the centrally planned economies of state socialism where informalization responds to the contradictions of redistributive bureaucratization, the embryonic market relations of the second economy are the congruent with the bureaucratic principles that coordinate the formal economy, and in fact, stimulate the institutionalization of transactive market relations and the expansion of property rights inside the socialist enterprise. As a sphere of activity relatively autonomous from the state, the second economy is a source of fundamental change remaking the economic institutions of socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing socio-economic development according to highly detailed pre-implementation plans rigidly applied has not had a high degree of success in generating sustained progress in the world's poorer nations. At the other end of the spectrum is the process approach that avoids specifying targets in advance, and concentrates upon building problem-solving capacity among the people involved. Many international donor and developing country agencies favour the blueprint model, despite its performance weaknesses, for its control and specificity. The process approach is limited by its lack of fit with agency procedures and incentives. This article discusses a structured flexibility approach to development management that integrates the blueprint model's planned structuring of action with the process model's flexibility and iterative learning orientation. This blend provides the basis for the programmatic and financial accountability required to obtain support from donor and developing country bureaucracies, and facilitates adaptive management to deal with uncertain and changing task environments. Case examples from the Caribbean, Portugal, and Pakistan illustrate the application of the structured flexibility approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is primarily concerned with the functions of bureaucracy in a minimal state and with how those functions might change in response to economic growth. It is predicated on the assumption that bureaucracy is necessary for economic growth even in those countries which seek to achieve such growth through the relatively free operation of the economy within the rubric of a capitalist state. Hong Kong is a case in point. Although it has often been taken as the epitome of the benefits which can be derived from keeping government out of the economy, the bureaucracy has in fact played a critical role in support of economic development. Aside from the functions which must be performed by any state, such as the maintenance of law and order, the administration of justice, and the provision of public works, three features of Hong Kong bureaucratic practice appear to have been important in the definition of the bureaucracy's tasks in the economic growth process. These are 'value for money' and the constant need to justify government expenditure; effective line implementation; and the ability to manage crises. If these constitute minimal essential requirements for such governments, they may provide useful criteria which small or micro-states, following capital growth models but not yet experiencing rapid economic development, can apply in assessing the capabilities of their own bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article examines the nature of the transitional society in the developing nations and reviews the role and problems of bureaucracy in the tasks of nation-building. Eight major characteristics of bureaucracy are identified, and its problems in the context of t fie culture of politics, the emerging ethos and the expanding sphere of Stale activity and new institutional arrangements are analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]