Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira
Paper to be part of book organized by Guido Bertucci on public administration and the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. Version December 8, 2005.
To grow and achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, nation states need a capable and efficient state organization. What type of public administration reform achieves these goals? Is public management reform instrumental to it, or should developing countries keep to classical civil service reform? This paper describes the structural public governance model of public management reform and argues that it contributes to a capable and efficient state, is neutral in distributive terms in so far as it can be used by a conservative or a center-left administration, and can be imported by developing countries provided that the ownership of it allows for two key factors in the success of an institutional reform: adaptation to local conditions, and understanding and acceptance by the wider society of the new rules of the game implied by the new institutions.
