POLICY RESEARCH WORKING PAPER 2427

# Summary findings

To perform well, public officials must be confident enough about the future to be able to see a relationship between their efforts and an eventual outcome. Their expectations are shaped by their institutional environment. If the rules are not credible or are unlikely to be enforced, or if they expect policies to be contradicted or resources to flow unpredictably, results will be uncertain, so there is little point in working purposefully.

Manning, Mukherjee, and Gokcekus present an analytical framework used to design a series of surveys of public officials' views of their institutional environment and to analyze the information generated in 15 countries. They describe how survey results help map a public sector's strengths and weaknesses and offer an approach to identifying potential payoffs from reforms.

The framework emphasizes how heterogeneous incentives and institutional arrangements are within the public sector. It emphasizes how important it is for policymakers to base decisions on information (not generalizations) that suggests what is most likely to work, and where.

In building on the premise that public officials' actions-and hence their organizations' performancedepend on the institutional environment in which they find themselves, this framework avoids simplistic antigovernment positions but doesn't defend poor performance. Some public officials perform poorly and engage in rent seeking, but some selfless and determined public officials work hard under extremely difficult conditions. This framework offers an approach for understanding both bad performance and good and for presenting the results to policymakers in a format that leads to more informed choices about public sector reform.

Types of reforms discussed include strengthening the credibility of rules for evaluation, for record management, for training, and for recruitment; ensuring that staff support government policy; preventing political interference or micromanagement; assuring staff that they will be treated fairly; and making government policies consistent.

This paper-a product of the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network-is part of a larger effort in the network to develop practical strategies for the reform of public sector institutions. The surveys were funded by the World Bank-Netherlands Partnership Program. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433. Please contact Claudia Nolan, room MC4-562, telephone 202-473-0030, fax 202-522-7132, email addresscnolan@worldbank.org. Policy ResearchWorkingPapers are also posted on theWeb atwww.worldbank.org/ research/workingpapers. The authors may be contacted at nmanning@worldbank.org, rmukherjee@worldbank.org, or ogokcekus@worldbank.org. August 2000. (65 pages) _The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represeni._ Produced by the Policy Research Dissemination Center