Managing the civil service : what LDCs can learn from developed country reforms

The author examines current civil service management (CSM) practices in advanced countries to provide guidance for developing country governments that face the dilemma of how to recruit, retain, and motivate appropriately skilled staff at affordable costs, given a limited human resource base. Advanced country administrations are following two distinct paths to improving CSM. Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, are engaged insweeping"managerialist"reforms to decentralize civil service functions and make them more responsive to the client public. By introducing complex financial reporting systems, managers have increased autonomy; some functions are spun off into semi-autonomous agencies operating on an increasingly commercial basis. By contrast, other industrialized countries, such as Singapore, have retained more traditional, largely centralized civil service structures, pursuing only incremental improvements in specific aspects of CSM. The author speculates about what is likely to work best in developing country administrations: Centralized civil service management models provide the best starting point for most developing countries because decentralized agency systems require technological and human resources beyond their capabilities. Some better-endowed countries could use certain agency-type features selectively. Such administrations could establish strategic plans to move toward a fuller agency system as their institutional capabilities increase. Developing countries face trade-offs in choosing which CSM functions should be strengthened first. Two functions - personnel establishment control and staff recruitment - are essential for civil service performance and should get top priority. Senior Executive Services have proved difficult to design and implement in advanced countries, but many flaws can be corrected in adapting them to developing countries, where there is often an urgent need to groom higher-level staff. Assuming minimal, essential levels of personnel establishment and budgetary control, unified pay and classification could be relaxed in developing countries, following the lead of increasing numbers of advanced countries that have done this. Given the urgency of other CSM tasks, lower priority should be assigned to reform involving performance pay, the benefits of which have yet to be demonstrated in the public sectors of developed countries. The management requirements and costs of installingperformance pay systems can be considerable and employee resistance may subvert such efforts. But performance-related promotion systems, even if imperfectly implemented, can help move developing country civil service values toward standards of competence and merit.National Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Work&Working Conditions,Governance Indicators,Public Sector Economics&Finance

Public sector management issues in structural adjustment lending

This paper reviews the Bank's experience in implementing public sector management reforms through structural adjustment lending. The study focuses on those institutional aspects of adjustment that deal with"macro-management"issues related to improvements in the management performance of core central government institutions and to systemic changes in public adminstrations. The paper reached the following broad conclusions; (a) public sector management components of SALs progressed unevenly and outcomes varied with diverse political, administrative and economic conditions; (b) reforms for which routinized methodologies and systems were introduced and those that could be linked to actionable steps were more likely to be sustained over time; (c) short time horizons of SALs posed severe constraints on the effective implementation of public sector management reforms; and (d) reforms through SALs are more successful when supported by specific technical assistance projects. It also concluded that: (e) the haste of SAL schedules and the lack of dynamism and focus of traditional technical assistance argues for the creation of a new lending instrument; (f) country economic and sector work is crucial to successful reforms undertaken through SALs; and (g) monitoring and supervision of institutional components of SALs needs to be systemized and the quality of documentation improved.Public Sector Economics&Finance,National Governance,Banks&Banking Reform,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Policy, Institutions and Governance

Civil service reform and the World Bank

The emphasis placed by the World Bank in recent years on the major overhaul of developing country economies has accentuated the importance of adequate public sector administrative capacity, especially within the central core of government, that is, the civil service. This paper surveys recent Bank experience in civil service reform, and begins to assess the progress made. The paper focuses on two separate but related aspects of civil service reform work. One deals with the shorter term, emergency steps to reform public pay and employment policies. These reforms usually focus on measures to contain the cost and size of the civil service, mostly in the context of structural adjustment lending. The other set of reforms are those dealing with longer range civil service strengthening efforts, some of which may support various nearer term cost containment measures, but most of which are directed toward ongoing, sustained management improvements. Many of these reforms have been included in technical assistance projects, either those that stand alone as"development management"operations or those that constitute direct institutional support for specific actions taken in SALs.Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Labor Management and Relations,National Governance

Public sector pay and employment reform : a review of World Bank experience

This paper offers an interim review of the Bank's experience with public sector pay and employment reform. Its aim is to establish what has been done and what has been learnt to date. The objectives of the paper are to inventory and analyze Bank operational work in selected countries and to provide a brief guide to Bank research and policy work on this subject. The review covers the period between 1981 and February 1987. The paper tries to draw attention to issues that have emerged in the early phases of these activities and to make some tentative suggestions about directions for future Bank work; rather than draw conclusions about the impact of these efforts. The paper covers only the Bank's experience with pay and employment policy issues in central governments (generally with particular reference to the civil service).Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Labor Management and Relations,Environmental Economics&Policies

Arenavirus Infection Induces Discrete Cytosolic Structures for RNA Replication

Arenaviruses are responsible for acute hemorrhagic fevers with high mortality and pose significant threats to public health and biodefense. These enveloped negative-sense RNA viruses replicate in the cell cytoplasm and express four proteins. To better understand how these proteins insinuate themselves into cellular processes to orchestrate productive viral replication, we have identified and characterized novel cytosolic structures involved in arenavirus replication and transcription. In cells infected with the nonpathogenic Tacaribe virus or the attenuated Candid#1 strain of Junin virus, we find that newly synthesized viral RNAs localize to cytosolic puncta containing the nucleoprotein (N) of the virus. Density gradient centrifugation studies reveal that these replication-transcription complexes (RTCs) are associated with cellular membranes and contain full-length genomic-and antigenomic-sense RNAs. Viral mRNAs segregate at a higher buoyant density and are likewise scant in immunopurified RTCs, consistent with their translation on bulk cellular ribosomes. In addition, confocal microscopy analysis reveals that RTCs contain the lipid phosphatidylinositol-4-phosphate and proteins involved in cellular mRNA metabolism, including the large and small ribosomal subunit proteins L10a and S6, the stress granule protein G3BP1, and a subset of translation initiation factors. Elucidating the structure and function of RTCs will enhance our understanding of virus-cell interactions that promote arenavirus replication and mitigate against host cell immunity. This knowledge may lead to novel intervention strategies to limit viral virulence and pathogenesis

Dissection of the Role of the Stable Signal Peptide of the Arenavirus Envelope Glycoprotein in Membrane Fusion

The arenavirus envelope glycoprotein (GPC) retains a stable signal peptide (SSP) as an essential subunit in the mature complex. The 58-amino-acid residue SSP comprises two membrane-spanning hydrophobic regions separated by a short ectodomain loop that interacts with the G2 fusion subunit to promote pH-dependent membrane fusion. Small-molecule compounds that target this unique SSP-G2 interaction prevent arenavirus entry and infection. The interaction between SSP and G2 is sensitive to the phylogenetic distance between New World (Junin) and Old World (Lassa) arenaviruses. For example, heterotypic GPC complexes are unable to support virion entry. In this report, we demonstrate that the hybrid GPC complexes are properly assembled, proteolytically cleaved, and transported to the cell surface but are specifically defective in their membrane fusion activity. Chimeric SSP constructs reveal that this incompatibility is localized to the first transmembrane segment of SSP (TM1). Genetic changes in TM1 also affect sensitivity to small-molecule fusion inhibitors, generating resistance in some cases and inhibitor dependence in others. Our studies suggest that interactions of SSP TM1 with the transmembrane domain of G2 may be important for GPC-mediated membrane fusion and its inhibition

The Social Life of Slurs

The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expression that some teenagers use as an intensifier when they’re emphasizing that social identity. That is, racists don’t use slurs because they’re derogatory; slurs are derogatory because they’re the words that racists use. To use a slur is to exploit the Maxim of Manner (or Levinson’s M-Principle) to signal one’s affiliation with a group that has a disparaging attitude towards the slur’s referent. This account is sufficient to explain all the familiar properties of slurs, such as their speaker orientation and “nondetachability,” with no need of additional linguistic mechanisms. It also explains some features of slurs that are rarely if ever explored; for example the variation in tone and strength among the different slurs for a particular group, the existence of words we count as slurs, such as 'redskin', which almost all of their users consider to be respectful, and the curious absence in Standard English of any commonly used slurs—by which I mean words used to express a negative attitude toward an entire group—for Muslims and women