enforcement of liability rules are all examples of sectoral changes that applies across sectors and reduce the scope for manipulation of sector politics for some form of personal benefit. Without a broader legally supported commitment and support from all branches of government, the instruments for sector governance are all highly reversible— and can be manipulated—as discussed in Section 5.

From a research perspective, this paper shows that many doors still need to be opened. Most of the evidence on the effectiveness of policies is anecdotal or biased toward politics, economics, or finance. Very little of the evidence is based on assessments cutting across fields and very little does justice to the complexity and subtlety of the solutions needed to ensure that private agendas do not interfere with sector performance. Even when empirical evidence is available, it often yields only a partial sense of the strength of the distortions stemming from political interference. Theoretical models are not sufficiently developed to shed light on these empirically weakly described mechanisms since most of them are specialized and deal with only one sector governance problem at a time. Moreover, few have the ability to tailor their advice to the evolution of the conditions in which sectoral reforms are implemented since most of these models are also static—and this in spite of the fact that one of the main performance concerns is the speed at which coverage improvements are achieved, which is essentially a dynamic problem. The upshot is that there is a huge research agenda. The case for humility when making policy recommendations should be as great as the gap in knowledge.

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