David Dapice, April 2013
Exports of rice to China have exploded and are now over half of total exports. Because of high support prices for paddy and thus for rice in China, it is profitable to send rice and even paddy to China from Myanmar, where the imported rice can sometimes get higher local prices. This could draw rice away from “normal” exports out of Yangon and even raise the price of paddy (and thus rice) in Myanmar to a level above the world price, causing imports to Myanmar. Imports to Myanmar would keep the price of rice lower than if the China price set Myanmar’s price. The major point for Myanmar is to use this as an opportunity for farmers to get higher prices and to produce more, but this will take different credit and input policies. This is a limited opportunity, for China may prefer to import rice officially by sea rather than informally through Yunnan. Indeed, border checks intensified in March 2013, reducing flows. More»
Using a New Federalism for Unity and Progress in Myanmar
David Dapice and Thomas Vallely, March 2013
When in 2010, the President of the Union of Myanmar, the Speaker of the Lower House and several ministers decided to push for a rapid political opening, they engineered what could be called a critical juncture. This critical juncture now provides the country with an opportunity to move forward, not only with faster economic growth, but also with better quality growth and political change that will unify the nation and create broad progress. In exploring a possible approach toward unity and progress, this paper uses the framework developed in Why Nations Fail, a recent book on economic and political development and also refers to the idea of “illiberal democracy” articulated by Fareed Zakaria. The basic idea is that a broad coalition of the incumbent party, the democratic opposition, ethnic groups and the military is needed to fundamentally change Myanmar’s past failed orientation. This broad coalition should work for a new federalism in which states (at a minimum) have fairly elected governors and meaningful revenue sources so they can run many of their own affairs. Recognizing that central to real progress is a transition from a repressive, extractive and exclusive political system with crony businesses to a broadly inclusive political system that spreads economic opportunity, the paper argues that broad political and economic change need to go hand in hand. More»
Kenneth Winston, Issues in Legal Scholarship 10:1, 18-32, December 2012
The curricula of schools of public policy and management cover three broad areas: policy analysis, strategic management, and politics. The mission is not only to educate professionals in these areas but enable them to integrate the three in depth. What kind of professional can do this, and are there generic skills and capacities that this person must possess? This essay explores a core dimension of professional skill that Winston refers to as moral competence—the set of attributes and dispositions that make for good governance. On the assumption that the needed skills and the nature of the polity are inextricably linked, the central question is: What constitutes moral competence for a practitioner of democratic governance? Winston sketches six generic attributes that he regards as constituent components of the good practitioner, and indicates how the case method of teaching helps to cultivate these virtues. More»
Standford Borins and Richard Walker, December 2012
The adoption of new services and practices is widespread in public organizations as they respond to demands in the external environment and internal aspirations. In order to recognize these activities and disseminate good practices, awards programs have proliferated around the globe. Given the limited empirical analysis of the characteristics of innovation award winners, this article examines the 2010 Innovations in American Government Awards (IAGA) program. More»
David Dapice, December 2012
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) recently released an excellent report on Myanmar’s energy sector. In it they presented estimates of future demand growth by the Ministry of Electric Power for electricity. They show demand doubling from 12,459 million kWh in 2012-13 to 25,683 million kWh in 2018-19, a compound rate of growth of 13% a year. However, the actual production in 2012 appears to be only 10,000 million kWh, and it is unlikely that moving to 2012-13 will raise the total much beyond 10,500 million kWh. Of this output, about 1700 million kWh will be exported. (Electricity exports exceeded 1700 million kWh in both 2010 and 2011.) So, the likely electricity output in 2012-13 available for domestic use will be 3659 kWh below this year’s demand estimate. Production for domestic use would have to jump by 42% to equal the expected demand. This is a massive shortfall and demand grows by over 1500 million kWh in 2013-14. So for 2013-14, supply net of exports would have to grow by nearly 5200 million kWh to account for the existing shortfall and projected growth, or by nearly 60% over 2012-13. More»
Armen Hakhverdian and Quinton Mayne, July 2012
This article examines how the effect of education on institutional trust varies cross-nationally as a function of the pervasiveness of public-sector corruption. We approach institutional trust as a performance-based evaluation of political institutions. Given their greater capacity to accurately assess the level of corruption coupled with their stronger commitment to democratic values, we hypothesize that higher-educated citizens should react differently to corruption from those with less education. Employing multilevel models we find that education has both a conditional and a conditioning effect on institutional trust. First, education is negatively related to institutional trust in corrupt societies and positively related to institutional trust in clean societies. Second, the corrosive effect of corruption on institutional trust worsens as education improves. The article ends with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the functioning of contemporary democracies. More»
David Dapice, September 2012
Myanmar, long isolated from western economies due to its government, is one of the poorest and worst governed countries in the world.1 Ruled for many years by a reclusive dictator, senior general Than Shwe, it was dependent on China for diplomatic protection and arms. Trade and investment deals reflected its lack of alternatives. China’s “One nation, two oceans” policy and Yunnan’s “Bridgehead” strategy envisioned Myanmar providing access to the sea via gas and oil pipelines, deep sea ports, naval docking facilities and transport for Yunnan. Yunnan through its Southern Grid along with CPI (China Power International) saw Myanmar’s Kachin state as providing ample hydroelectric supplies for the landlocked Chinese province. Deals were signed under General Than Shwe without popular review or consultation with the Kachin whose state had most of the hydroelectric sites. More»
David Dapice, May 2012
There is an immense challenge facing the leadership in Myanmar. They have to negotiate a nation and to reform the basic assumptions and processes that have ruled for the past decades. They need to make the new system more representative, more inclusive, less favorable to a narrow group of businessmen and government or army officials, and more broadly successful. The new system has to give minority groups a reason to want to be part of the new nation. That means not only creating new sources of growth and wealth, but also making rules that ensure the benefits go to many more than the relatively narrow groups who have largely benefitted in the past. The technical adjustments needed in the exchange rate, the financial system, taxing and spending, infrastructure investments, and competition policy will all ultimately be judged on the ability of the policy package to create the conditions for national unity and progress. The government needs to have a vision of this goal and how the pieces fit together. Getting it to work in a shaky world economy with new and still evolving institutions is a huge challenge. But for those who have seen the past clearly for what it was, there can be no doubt that moving forward together is better than going back or staying put. More»
Herman B. “Dutch” Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt - August 2012
Emergency response organizations must deal with both “routine emergencies” (dangerous events, perhaps extremely severe, that are routine because they can be anticipated and prepared for) and “true crises” (which, because of significant novelty, cannot be dealt with exclusively by pre-determined emergency plans and capabilities). These types of emergencies therefore require emergency response organizations to adopt very different leadership strategies, if they are effectively to cope with the differential demands of these events. This paper develops ideas about leadership under crisis conditions, concentrating on the political leadership and decision making functions that are thrust to the center of concern during such crisis events. More»
David Dapice, May 2012
Electricity is a fundamental input to every modern economy. Electricity consumption per capita in Myanmar is among the lowest in Asia and had been growing very slowly since the 1980’s. It gently grew from 45 kWh per capita in 1987 to 99 kWh in 2008, a 3.8 percent annual growth rate.1 However, since 2008, the production of electricity has jumped very quickly. This 50 percent jump in three years is about 15 percent per year, far higher than in the past. The CSO does not report any increase in installed capacity since 2009/10, so the existing system is being worked much more intensively. This creates problems, such as the risk of sudden outages from failures in generators. Indeed, there has been an increase in blackouts in the Yangon and Mandalay areas in the last year in spite of higher output – and even during the wet season. With increases in tourism, exports and overall economic activity, electricity demand will continue to soar. Even with 2011/12 output, estimated consumption in Myanmar is only about 160 kWh per capita, compared to 2009 consumption of over 250 kWh per capita in Bangladesh and nearly 600 in Indonesia. Vietnam had over 1000 kWh per capita in 2011. More»
Dwight H. Perkins, April 2012
Myanmar faces fundamental choices about its economic future when the sanctions are lifted, and many of these choices will be present even if some of the sanctions remain. There is no technical reason why Myanmar cannot achieve a GDP growth rate of 8 percent a year or more for several decades. If the country did achieve a growth rate of that magnitude, the standard of living of its people would double over the next decade and increase four-fold over the next two decades. Poverty would fall dramatically, first in the more developed regions and then nationwide. In the most recent two decades, in contrast, Myanmar’s electric power consumption suggests that GDP growth per capita has at best been negligible and may even have been negative.
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José A. Gómez-Ibáñez and Nguyễn Xuân Thành, March 2012
Yangon is an attractive and relatively livable city that is on the brink of dramatic change. If the government of Myanmar continues its recent program of economic and political reform, the economy of the country is likely to take off, and much of the growth will be concentrated in Yangon, Myanmar’s largest city and commercial capital. This paper argues that Yangon is poorly prepared to cope with the pressures of growth because it has only begun to develop a comprehensive land use and development plan for the city that would guide the location of key activities including export-oriented industries and port terminals. In addition, the city lacks the financial resources to finance the infrastructure and other public services required to serve the existing population, let alone support a population that is larger and better off. Failure to address these challenges will not only make Yangon a less livable city but will also reduce the rate of economic growth for the entire country. Myanmar needs a dynamic and vibrant Yangon to thrive. More»
David O. Dapice, Michael J. Montesano, Anthony J. Saich, Thomas J. Vallely, January 2012
This paper is the first iteration in an ongoing effort by the Ash Center and Proximity Designs to describe a growth strategy for Myanmar that takes account of political and economic realities – assuming that sanctions will soon be removed. Myanmar is a country facing a difficult political and economic transition. In spite of the implications of official statistics and recent surveys, it is a very poor country, long mired in conflict and cut off from much of the world. It has an immense struggle ahead, as it tries to create a more modern and capable state apparatus, a competitive private sector and economy, and an economic and political system that reflects popular sentiments. It is not just behind its neighbors – it is starting from a different place altogether. More»
David Dapice, January 2012
The exchange rate has moved from about 1300 kyat per dollar in 2006-07 to 800 kyat to the dollar in January 2012 while the consumer price index has jumped by over two-thirds. World rice prices in dollars have been generally strong, with Vietnamese five percent broken export prices at $520/ton in December 2011, 78 percent above their 2006/07 average. Wholesale paddy prices in Myanmar have plunged 30 percent in real terms from 2007 to 2012 and 25 percent in just the last year. For a variety of reasons, the paddy price to farmers may have fallen even more. This results in less hiring of landless neighbors, migration out of the village (often to a foreign country), less use of inputs and reduced summer paddy planting. Sharp real price declines in pulses have also been reported, though the exchange rate is only one contributing factor to their low prices. Poor quality pulses due to untimely rains and reduced demand from India also play some role. More»
Jonathan Pincus, Vu Thanh Tu Anh, Pham Duy Nghia, Ben Wilkinson, and Nguyen Xuan Thanh, January 2012
This paper has been prepared for the third annual Vietnam Executive Leadership Program (VELP), to be held at Harvard Kennedy School from February 12 to 17, 2012. The goal of this paper is to provide participants in the VELP forum, including Vietnamese government officials, international scholars, and corporate executives, with an assessment of some of the key public policy challenges confronting Vietnam today. This paper is by no means comprehensive; by necessity, it has not been possible to undertake an exhaustive study of every policy area. In selecting which issues to address, the authors have been guided by the priorities of the Vietnamese government as they have been articulated in policy statements promulgated over the past year. More»
Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt, January 2012
Severe natural disasters, large-scale industrial accidents or epidemics often expose emergency response organisations and society to previously unseen threats, response demands that exceed available resources, or familiar emergencies in unprecedented combinations or complex layers. Two kinds of leaders are likely to come to the fore: professional emergency response chiefs and political leaders. More»
Joseph W. Pfeifer, January 2012
Repairs to sanitation plows and salt-spreaders usually go unnoticed, but when a truck smashes through a wall and is dangling four stories above the ground, it draws intense media attention. On August 17, 2011, at 0928 hours, a 15.5-ton truck lost control inside the Department of Sanitation’s Central Repair Facility in Maspeth, Queens, and plowed through an upper floor wall. When FDNY units arrived, the driver, Robert Legall, 56, was tightly grasping the steering wheel, as three-quarters of his truck hung precariously out a window at a 45-degree angle, some 40 feet above the street. The impact of the truck showered the sidewalk and road with bricks, shattering windshields and crushing roofs of parked cars. More»
Tim Burke and Gigi Georges, December 2011
As the US grapples with fiscal crisis—facing spiraling deficits, dangerous levels of debt, and the worst economic recession in some 70 years—Americans understand that all levels of their government must take action. Calls are growing louder from across the political spectrum for the same spirit of cost-cutting and financial restraint within government that so many families have had to embrace. According to a Pew Research Center poll in early 2011, however, even while Americans increasingly recognize the need to halt increases in spending, many remain reluctant to embrace specific cuts. There is still not one area of domestic federal spending —whether education, veterans’ benefits, health care or public safety—that more Americans, when pressed, want to decrease more than they want to increase. More»
By David Dapice and Edward A. Cunningham, December 2011
Ensuring affordable, stable, and accessible energy supply remains one of the most critical functions of government, particularly in the developing world. The creation and expansion of a national energy system presents governments with inherent risks that must be managed if an economy is to be supplied with the energy it requires to grow. Some risks are structural, and inherent to the sector itself. Energy systems are characterized by high levels of capital intensity (e.g. oil refining), long-cycle investments with extended pay-back periods (e.g. oil exploration and production), natural monopolies (e.g. electric grid and gas transmission), and high levels of risk that result from the combination of these attributes. Energy flows may also carry the added complexity of perceived national security externalities, such as supply risk in the form of oil import dependency on one partner. More»
David O. Dapice, Malcolm McPherson, Michael J. Montesano, Thomas J. Vallely, and Ben Wilkinson, November 2011
In May 2010, a team from the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia at Harvard Kennedy School wrote a report on approaches to the revitalization of Myanmar’s agricultural sector for Proximity Designs, a Myanmar (Burma) social entrepreneurship organization. The same Harvard Kennedy School team (with one extra member) visited Myanmar in June 2011 to update and expand upon its 2010 report. Important changes had occurred since May 2010. A new government had assumed control; in an atmosphere of anticipation and some excitement, new and potentially effective policies were being discussed and developed. The drought in the Dry Zone had ended, but unseasonable rains had affected production. Some initiative had been taken to offer more agricultural credit to farmers, an important suggestion of the May 2010 report. More»
Archon Fung and Zachary Tumin, October 2011
In June 2010, 25 leaders of government and industry convened to Harvard University to assess the move to “Government 2.0” to date; to share insight to its limits and possibilities, as well as its enablers and obstacles; and to assess the road ahead. This is a report of that meeting, made possible by a grant from Microsoft. More»
Douglas Ahlers, Arnold M. Howitt, and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, October 2011
In the past decade, the world has looked in horror at many heart-wrenching scenes of human suffering and physical devastation in Asia – including the tsunami of 2004, China’s earthquake of 2008, Pakistan’s floods of 2010, and Japan’s earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident this year. Unfortunately, these will not be the last of such tragic events, given Asia’s significant exposure to natural disasters, increasingly complex and interdependent social and economic systems, intensifying urbanisation in risk-exposed locations, and its vulnerability to the impact of climate change. More»
David O. Dapice, Malcolm McPherson, Michael J. Montesano, Thomas J. Vallely, and Ben Wilkinson, June 2011
The exchange rate is one of the most important tools in economic development. In Myanmar (Burma), an overvalued exchange rate is currently undermining economic activity involving all tradable goods. If this situation persists, the country’s industrial base will shrink, investors will be discouraged, unemployment will rise, poverty will deepen, more people will leave the country, the divide between rich and poor will grow, and national strength and the people’s prosperity will be diminished if not destroyed. Myanmar’s overvalued exchange rate is inconsistent with the development experience throughout Asia since 1945. More»
Arnold M. Howitt and Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, June 2011
March 11 earthquake and tsunami were horrific: tens of thousands of people killed or missing and presumed dead, immense property damage, and an evacuation zone around the crippled TEPCO nuclear reactors. As severe as these immediate effects of the disaster were, they were compounded by other effects – one thing after another, each affecting the others negatively. Within a wide area of Japan, particularly where the tsunami struck, the tightly interconnected systems of modern life virtually collapsed. Utilities (power, water, transport, communications), economic activity (manufacturing, power generation, food distribution, local businesses), social and community networks, and government services (sanitation, policing, emergency response, healthcare) were drastically disrupted or destroyed. More»
William H. Overholt, May 2011
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton had an enormously successful campaign slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Whereas Clinton just saved a campaign with this strategy, Park Jung Hee saved a country.
Park Jung Hee took over the most threatened country in the world in 1961. South Korea had been devastated by the Korean War just a few years earlier. Its economy remained one of the world’s poorest. Its political stability appeared to be among the world’s poorest. It faced a formidable opponent with greater natural resources, superior industrial power, seemingly superior political stability and the backing of Mao Zedong’s unified and determined China. More»
David O. Dapice, Mike Montesano, Thomas J. Vallely, and Ben Wilkinson, July 2010
This is a study of the rice economy in Myanmar (Burma). It seeks to identify barriers and bottlenecks that are hindering growth and depressing value in a sector that must play a central role in alleviating the extreme poverty that currently afflicts an expanding proportion of rural households. The issues that this paper addresses are of importance to the entire Myanmar economy and its prospects for achieving a higher level of growth and delivering prosperity to the Myanmar people. This is because many of the barriers to greater productivity in the rice economy are also obstacles to growth of the economy as a whole. More»
Vietnam Program, July 2010
A broad consensus has emerged in Vietnam that higher education is in need of deep and wide-reaching reform. This consensus extends from students and their families to public intellectuals and educators to policymakers at the highest levels of government. Vietnam‘s national competitiveness increasingly depends on skilled human capital, which its higher education system is not delivering. Ever growing numbers of families are choosing to send their children abroad for undergraduate and even high school education in order for them to acquire the skills and credentials needed to succeed in the global economy. More»
Dang Hoa Ho and Malcolm McPherson, May 2010
This paper is part of a study “Policy Analysis for the Development of Land Policy for Socio-Economic Development.” Land policy relates to the institutional arrangements through which the Government of Vietnam defines which individuals and groups have access to rights in land and the circumstances that apply to gaining and retaining that access. The overall goal is to ensure that land in Vietnam is used efficiently and equitably so as to achieve the government’s objectives of rapid economic growth, poverty reduction, food security, international competitiveness, social harmony, and environmental sustainability. More»
Sarah Dix, Diego Miranda, and Charles H. Norchi, February 2010
Between January and September of 2007, a team composed of Dr. Sarah Dix, Mr. Diego Miranda, and Dr. Charles H. Norchi appraised the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) country office programs, procedures, and management as implemented from 2003 to 2007. During the 2003 to 2007 period, the country program cycle focused on promoting good governance, conflict prevention, community recovery, and fighting HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Overall, the office managed more than $500 million for all programs, becoming among the three largest UNDP country operations in the world. This report examines the organizational dimensions of the UNDP office in the DRC, and analyzes its most important program innovations. More»
Archon Fung and David Weil, February 2010
Enthusiasts of transparency should be aware of two major pitfalls that may mar this achievement. The first is that government transparency, though driven by progressive impulses, may draw excessive attention to government’s mistakes and so have the consequence of reinforcing a conservative image of government as incompetent and corrupt. The second is that all this energy devoted to making open government comes at the expense of leaving the operations of large private sector organizations—banks, manufacturers, health providers, food producers, drug companies, and the like—opaque and secret. In the major industrialized democracies (but not in many developing countries or in authoritarian regimes), these private sector organizations threaten the health and well-being of citizens at least as much as government. More»
Sandford Borins, February 2010
This paper begins by outlining a number of key narratological concepts, such as the distinction between narrative—the events represented—and one or more narrators' presentations of the events, implied author and implied reader, and structural analysis of narrative genres. It then applies these concepts to the three narrations of the 31 finalists of the 2008 and 2009 Innovations in American Government Awards. The paper concludes with suggestions for how public management scholars could incorporate narratological insights into their analysis, how innovation awards could ask applicants to develop more explicit narratives, and how innovators could make more effective use of narrative in communicating their achievements. More»
Herman B. Leonard and Arnold M. Howitt, September 2010
The horrific events of Black Saturday (February 7, 2009) in Victoria, Australia, constitute an extreme event. In January and February of 2009, Victoria experienced unprecedented climatic conditions of drought and heat that brought the state to a literally explosive fire condition, with tinder-dry fuels across the state needing only a combination of wind and an ignition source to touch off potentially devastating fires. Over the course of January and early February, firefighters responded to literally hundreds of fires. In the first week of February, historically high temperatures prevailed across the state, with new records set in many locations. Melbourne experienced temperatures for three consecutive days above 43 degrees Celsius (109 degrees Fahrenheit), further exacerbating already historically-threatening fire conditions. More»
Archon Fung and Elena Fagotto, October 20, 2009
“Sustaining Public Engagement: Embedded Deliberation in Local Communities,” features concrete examples of sustained community-led dialogue and problem-solving efforts, and should be of interest to researchers and community organizers. The report notes that the most successful civic engagement efforts not only address particular public issues such as school redistricting, domestic violence, or racism, but also improve the quality of local democratic governance. “Those who build institutions and practices of public engagement often work at two levels,” according to the authors. “Not only do they address urgently felt needs in their communities, but, although they may not have intended it, they also improve the machinery of democratic self-government.” More»
The New School, June 2009
Knowledge and human capital are now the main drivers of economic development and the key determinants of national competitiveness. The role of research universities in the development process has changed as a result of the emergence of the knowledge economy. Research universities educate a country’s most talented students, irrespective of socioeconomic status; their graduates serve society in important ways, as innovators, entrepreneurs, managers, civil servants, and political and civic leaders. In developing countries, apex research universities often play a critical role in adapting advancements in global knowledge to conditions in their own countries. The knowledge generated by research universities contributes to social well being and prosperity. Research universities are increasingly viewed as symbols of national prestige. Having a handful of research universities benefits the entire national education system by producing highly qualified professors and teachers. For all of these reasons, countries have expended vast sums of money in an effort to build world-class research universities. However, the results of these efforts have been mixed. More»
Dwight Perkins and Vu Thanh Tu Anh, March 2009
Vietnam has made a remarkable transition since 1989 from a centrally planned industrial sector dominated by administrative allocation of inputs and outputs to an industrial sector governed mainly by market forces. Furthermore, Vietnam accomplished this transition while avoiding the sharp fall in GDP and industrial output that occurred in so many other centrally planned economies. In the 1980s, Vietnamese exports covered less than half of the country’s relatively small import requirements and virtually no Vietnamese industries were capable of selling their products in the demanding markets of Europe and North America. Twenty years later Vietnamese exports are twenty fold what they were in the 1980s and industrial products sold around the world are the largest contributors to these export sales. More»
Vietnam Program, March 2009
During two weeks in January 2009 a team from the Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, International Development Enterprises (IDE), and the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation of the Union of Myanmar conducted a humanitarian assessment of food production and the agricultural economy in Myanmar. This report summarizing the team's findings and focuses on paddy production, because rice is the country’s staple crop. Based on field work in cyclone-affected areas of the Ayeyarwady River Delta and in Upper Myanmar, the report concludes that paddy output is likely to drop in 2009, potentially creating a food shortage by the third quarter. Estimates are based on imperfect data, and this scenario may not materialize, but the avoidance of a food shortage this year would represent a temporary reprieve, not a recovery. More»
David Dapice and Nguyen Xuan Thanh, February 2009
Successful countries provide economy and society with infrastructure needed to maintain growth. Development experience suggests that investing 7 percent of GDP in infrastructure is the right order of magnitude for high and sustained growth. Over the last twelve years, the government of Vietnam was able to sustain infrastructure investment at 10 percent of GDP. This remarkably high level of investment has resulted in a rapid expansion of infrastructure stocks and improved access. Despite this achievement, Vietnam is experiencing more and more infrastructure weaknesses that negatively affect its ability to sustain high economic growth in the long term. Transport and electricity – the two most essential infrastructure activities – appear to be the weakest infrastructure sectors in Vietnam with blackouts and traffic jams occurring more and more frequently. More»
Nguyen Xuan Thanh, Vu Thanh Tu Anh, David Dapice, Jonathan Pincus, and Ben Wilkinson, January 2009
This paper responds to a request from the Vietnamese government for an analysis of the impact of the global economic crisis on Vietnam, and policy recommendations to help the government stimulate growth and reduce the risk of financial crisis. The government has proposed an economic stimulus valued at six billion U.S. dollars, although details of this plan are still being worked out as this document is prepared. The roots of macroeconomic instability in Vietnam are domestic, and that the appropriate policy response is structural change. This paper argues that the deepening of the international economic downturn strengthens the case for structural reforms. Further, the paper suggests that the fiscal and monetary stimulus proposed by the government will not have the desired impact but will instead accelerate inflation and increase systemic financial risks. The authors recommend an alternative set of policies including gradual depreciation of the VND and adjustments to the public investment program to delay capital and import intensive projects in favor of labor intensive projects that do not rely heavily on imports. More»
Jay Rosengard and Huynh The Du, January 2009
Given the importance of financial sector development for sustained economic growth, especially in the context of Vietnam’s own performance since embarking the Đổi Mới economic reforms twenty years ago, the objective of this study is to analyze the financial sector development in Vietnam and China within the framework of financial sector reforms introduced in the two countries. The study assesses the progress to date and future challenges for each country; compares and contrasts financial sector reform strategies and performance; and formulates policy recommendations for further financial sector reform in Vietnam. More»
Nguyen Xuan Thanh, Vu Thanh Tu Anh, David Dapice, Jonathan Pincus, Ben Wilkinson, September 2008
This paper responds to a request from the Vietnamese government for an analysis of the short- and long-term challenges confronting the Vietnamese economy. The paper argues that restoring macroeconomic stability and positioning the economy for long term growth will require fundamental, structural reform. The paper begins by comparing Vietnam's performance over the past 20 years to other countries in the region. This comparison reveals a set of worrisome trends which, taken together, raise questions about the sustainability of Vietnam's growth path. Part II examines the current macroeconomic environment and assesses the government's response to date. The paper concludes that, while government policy has succeeded in reducing macroeconomic turbulence in the short run, nothing has been done to address the structural weaknesses of the Vietnamese economy. More»
Vietnam Program, May 2008
The Vietnamese economy is facing its most serious challenges since the mid-1980s. Over the past several months the government has stated its determination to curb inflation and restore macroeconomic stability. These are indeed critical priorities, but the government’s actions to date to achieve this end have been largely ineffectual. This Vietnam Policy Discussion Paper argues that a restoration of the situation prior to the onset of the current instability is neither possible nor desirable. This is because the current situation is due largely to structural weaknesses in the Vietnamese economy; the international conditions that have been offered as explanations are, at best, secondary factors. More»
Nguyen Xuan Thanh, Vu Thanh Tu Anh, David Dapice, Jonathan Pincus, and Ben Wilkinson, February 2008
This paper argues that a series of resolute and coordinated policy interventions is needed to restore macroeconomic stability, cushion the impact of the global economic downturn, and keep Vietnam on the path of sustainable growth. Specifically, the Vietnamese government must quell price inflation, reduce fiscal and trade deficits and slow down money and credit growth through a consistent and synchronized set of policy interventions. Gradual deflation of the real estate price bubble is needed in order to avoid a sudden collapse in prices, which would, if it occurred, destabilize the financial sector with potentially serious contagion effects for the real economy. Successful implementation of these policy prescriptions in the near term, and maintaining a stable economic environment over the medium to long term, will require greater policy coordination than the Vietnamese government has demonstrated in recent years. More»
Steven J. Kelman, October 2006
During the past several years the most aggressive effort in the history of government has been made in the United Kingdom to use an innovative public management tool—the use of performance metrics and performance goals in the management of public sector organizations—both to improve the performance of public-sector organizations and also to recast some of the terms of democratic deliberation in the UK. As a pioneer in this innovation, the UK example may provide lessons for other governments as they seek to further implement this innovation. Professor Kelman's research, largely focusing on interviews with managers within UK government, seeks to discover how United Kingdom central government institutions have gone about trying to influence the performance of frontline organizations that must actually meet these targets. More»
Vietnam Program, August 2006
This report records the findings of a mission to Cambodia sponsored by the UNDP and UNICEF. The objective of the mission was to assess the present state of education in Cambodia and to make recommendations for how new investment might be used effectively to promote continued reform through institutional innovation. The mission was convened against the backdrop of ongoing negotiations between the U.S. and Cambodia over several PL-480 “humanitarian” loans made to the government of Lon Nol (1970-1975). There is bipartisan interest in the U.S. Congress in allocating these payments to support Cambodia’s continued development. It has been suggested that if and when Cambodia agrees to a repayment scheme, the United States government might use these repayments to endow a special vehicle to support education in Cambodia. More»
John D. Donahue, February 2006
In a phrase coined by Lord Bryce and popularized by Justice Louis Brandeis, America's separate states are seen as "laboratories of democracy," giving the United States 50 channels for generating fresh new approaches to public problems. The potential advantages are apparent. But how fully this potential is realized depends on how rapidly and reliably innovations developed in each "laboratory" diffuse to other states. As the literature on the diffusion of innovations is limited, the archives of the Innovations in American Government Awards offer a promising but mostly untapped data set for exploring the replication of valuable innovations. In this publication, Donahue identifies state-level award winners and traces the pace and pattern of their diffusion. More»
Gilberto Garcia, July 2005
After analyzing 271 government programs qualified as innovative through having won a national government and local management award in Mexico, and submitting a questionnaire to the 79 persons responsible for some of the best practices in the municipal government in the years 2001, 2002, and 2003, this paper identifies and analyzes variables that have a bearing on the emergence and sustainability of the innovation process in Mexico's local governments. The results show paradoxes in the process of innovation of organizations needing to accomplish increasingly complex objectives through a lack of mechanisms to accrue intermediate and long-term technical expertise, as well as organizational learning. This paper also describes the differences in the process of innovation according to three contextual variables: organization capability, institutional development, and political and electoral competition. More»
Archon Fung, David Weil, Mary Graham and Elena Fagotto, December 2004
Transparency systems have emerged in recent years as a mainstream regulatory tool, an important development in social policy. Transparency systems are government mandates that require corporations or other organizations to provide the public with factual information about their products and practices. Such systems have a wide range of regulatory purposes which include protecting investors, improving public health and safety, reducing pollution, minimizing corruption and improving public services. More»
Steven Kelman, May 2004
The need for government organizations to change how they work is a major theme among practitioners and observers of government, discussed informally and repeated constantly at conferences for practitioners. The need for organizational change is also a preoccupying theme in the business world. But the impetus for change in government is somewhat different. In the private sector, the assumption is that the organization's current performance is good, but that shifts in the organization's environment demands changes in what the organization produces or how it produces it. In government, by contrast, the impetus for organizational change is typically that current performance isn't what it should be. Government isn't working as well as it should, and organizational change is needed to improve performance. More»
Elaine Kamarck, November 2003
For some countries government reform and innovation involves the reform of an old bureaucracy in the context of a newly democratic state. For other countries, this entails an all out fight against corruption. For still other countries, the challenge is to modernize large, outmoded bureaucracies and bring them into the information age. While countries have come to government reform for very different reasons, government reform and innovation is a global phenomenon. This paper provides a review of government innovations undertaken in the last 20 years in many countries around the world including the United States. More»
Anil Gupta, October 2003
This paper presents an analysis of small grassroots innovations in India including the Honey Bee Network, underlying how small innovations can make a big difference. When the Honey Bee Network was started about 14 years ago, most innovators in three fields of technology, primary education, and common property institutions were poorly networked among themselves, though they were networked reasonably well within their communities. High degrees of fortitude, stubbornness, and to an extent, tendency to go alone were quite common and pronounced traits among the innovators. They were difficult to influence and even more difficult to convince of the need to network with others of their kind. It is against this context that the evolution of the Honey Bee Network and its influence on public policy, institutions, and structures is evaluated. More»
William Eggers, May 2003
Through the example of the General Service Administration, Eggers presents an analysis of how technology-enabled transformation entails breaking old habits, learning to do business in new ways, and adopting a radically different approach to serving your customers. Since nearly all the incentives in government work against all of these things, strong leadership is indispensable to achieving fundamental change in government. More»
John D. Donahue, April 2003
In this document, the introductory chapter to Making Washington Work: Tales of Innovation in the Federal Government, John Donahue acknowledges that the culture of the federal government includes an institutionalized bias toward continuity at the expense of change. His paper offers insights that heighten awareness of, and appreciation for, successful federal innovations that confront this bias. It provides a framework for exploring the complexities of innovation within large and long-established bureaucracies, and addresses such issues as scale, accountability, competition, pressure, and leadership. More»
James N. Levitt, December 2002
Observers throughout the course of U.S. history, including such prominent commentators as Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic volume Democracy in America, have dismissed Americans' willingness to appreciate or conserve nature. In fact, Americans have a long and distinguished record of realizing landmark conservation innovations that are novel on a worldwide basis; politically significant; measurably effective; transferable to separate organizations, jurisdictions, and nations; and, particularly significant in the field of conservation, enduring. This paper reviews conservation innovations in the U.S., starting with the observation that among the many important conservation innovations that Americans have achieved, only a distinct subset of them has had an enduring impact and so can be considered landmark innovations. More»
Peter Frumkin and Mark T. Kim, October 2002
This article draws on a large longitudinal data set of nonprofit organizations in order to shed light on the consequences of government funding on nonprofit administrative efficiency and gain a more grounded understanding of the link between public funding and nonprofit efficiency. The piece first surveys literature on the nature of public funding and its impact on the administrative efficiency of nonprofits. It then presents the data and analyzes the impact of public funding on a group of nonprofit organizations over an 11-year period. The piece concludes with an exploration of the implications of the findings for future research on public-nonprofit relations. More»
Peter Frumkin, April 2002
This paper explores the differences in operational and cultural characteristics of for-profit and nonprofit organizations, highlighting why many believe business firms have certain important advantages over nonprofits when it comes to competing for large human service contracts. The second section analyzes why public managers may need to structure service contracts in a way that not only maximizes short-term results, but that also affirms the importance of preserving a mixed organizational ecology. In a third and concluding section, some thoughts are offered on policy remedies that might supplement a more nuanced managerial approach to service contracting with nonprofit and for-profit providers. More»
Jonathan Walters, December 2001
Public sector innovation may be considered an oxymoron, but for 15 years the Ford Foundation and Harvard Kennedy School have been identifying innovative public sector programs at the state, local, federal, and tribal government levels through the Innovations in American Government Awards Program, funded by Ford and administered by the Kennedy School. What the initiatives identified through the program tell us is that despite government's well-deserved reputation for being unfriendly to new ideas and change, government has actually proved to be remarkably—even resiliently—innovative. But where does innovation come from? What drives people to innovate? And in a political world where program survival is often a matter of having the right political patrons, what characteristics make for sustainable, replicable, results-based innovation? More»
Mary Graham, May 2001
Since the mid-1980s a wide variety of federal and state laws in the United States have employed structured disclosure of factual information as a means of reducing risks to public health, safety, or the environment. These disclosure systems aim to create new economic or political incentives for organizations to improve their products or practices. In effect, they harness the government's enduring authority to command the disclosure of previously private information to create a form of risk regulation. In the past, each of these disclosure systems has been viewed as unique. No central plan has informed their architecture or increasing popularity. Evidence from four such systems suggests, however, that they represent a cohesive innovation in public policy. This paper discusses the challenges faced by policymakers in using this promising tool of risk regulation effectively in the future. More»
Bryan C. Hassel and Lucy Steiner, June 2000
The authors of the paper examine two intriguing programs: Success for All and the Accelerated Schools Program, each of which has been adopted by more than 1,000 schools nationwide. They argue that given the relative success of these programs at scaling up, focusing some attention on the strategies that their promoters have used in taking them to scale might prove informative and useful for subsequent efforts to scale up good practice. More»