Directions in Development – Public Sector Governance

With international focus on good governance and parliamentary effectiveness, a standards-based approach involving benchmarks and assessment frameworks has emerged to evaluate parliament's performance and guide its reforms. The World Bank's has been a leader in the development of these frameworks, stewarding a global multi-stakeholder process aimed at enhancing consensus around parliamentary benchmarks and indicators with international organizations and parliaments across the world. The results so far, some of which are captured in this book, are encouraging: countries as diverse as Australia, Canada, Ghana, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Zambia have used these frameworks for self-evaluation and to guide efficiency-driven reforms. Donors and practitioners, too, are finding the benchmarks useful as baselines against which they can assess the impact of their parliamentary strengthening programs. The World Bank itself is using these frameworks to surface the root causes of performance problems and explore how to engage with parliamentary institutions in order to achieve better results. The World Bank can identify opportunities to help improve the oversight function of parliament, thus holding governments to account, giving 'voice' to the poor and disenfranchised, and improving public policy formation in order to achieve a nation's development goals. In doing so, we are helping make parliaments themselves more accountable to citizens and more trusted by the public.

Strengthening Domestic Resource Mobilization: Moving from Theory to Practice in Low- and Middle-Income Countries analyzes the present status of government revenues and presents policy and administrative options relevant to these settings. The authors call for a joint consideration of tax and expenditure policy to enhance the likelihood of success in ensuring revenue sufficiency for sustained economic and social development. Increased domestic revenues can only lead to improved development outcomes if they are translated into productive and beneficial public expenditures. Public spending plays a key role in the economic growth and development in low- and middle-income countries. When revenue and expenditure reforms are embedded in broader public financial management reforms, Domestic resource mobilization becomes a development tool to support sustainable, inclusive development. The role of subnational governments in revenue mobilization and service delivery expenditure must also be included in the revenue mobilization agenda. The authors discuss the challenges of funding the Sustainable Development Goals, present revenue trends, explore reasons for continued revenue gaps and approaches to revenue augmentation, and detail issues in tax structure reform and initiatives to modernize tax administration. They provide a broad landscape of practical examples, drawing from lessons learned in World Bank operations across Global Practices in recent decades. The authors intend this publication to be a starting point for a more comprehensive research agenda rather than a complete inventory in itself.

Can technology truly bridge the gap between governments and citizens? This collection of articles, written by academics and practitioners, explores citizen engagement through information and communication technologies (ICTs). It examines how ICTs empower through participation, transparency, and accountability, focusing on bridging the 'accountability gap'. Closing the Feedback Loop explores multiple ICT initiatives that engage citizens in governance. Rich case studies demonstrate how technology enhances access to information, participation, collaboration, and empowerment. The authors offer concrete recommendations on closing feedback loops and improving public service delivery in developing countries. This is a critical resource for anyone seeking to leverage technology for meaningful citizen engagement and improved governance. Target Audience: Academics, policymakers, and practitioners in public sector governance and international development.

This volume-a collaborative work between the World Bank's Global Governance Practice and a team of researchers working with the Korean Development Institute-is dedicated to the proposition that there is much that can be learned from a careful and nuanced assessment of Korea's experience with e-governance. It seeks to draw lessons both from the large reservoir of experience as to what has worked, as well as the more limited and isolated examples of what has not. In particular, it seeks to achieve two objectives. The first is to accurately understand, capture and distill the key dimensions of Korea's e-governance experience so that it can be properly understood and appreciated. Towards this end, some of the world's leading experts on Korea's e-governance experience have been engaged in its preparation, and their conclusions have been carefully vetted and reviewed by other leading scholars of the role of IT systems within government. The goal is to avoid flip generalizations or characterizations, such as 'political will is important' or 'it is important to embed e-governance within a broader strategy to develop a domestic IT industry,' but to truly understand the complex interplay between differing political, economic and bureaucratic interests and how they shaped decisions about developing the technological and human infrastructure that would support Korea's successful thrust to be the world's leading nation in this area. The second is to ponder the lessons learned and what did and did not work from Korea's experience for other developing countries seeking to strengthen the role of information technology within their public sectors.