The hard road from reform to implementation

By Matt Andrews

A few years ago I was part of a team working on an economic growth strategy for an African country. In a meeting with members of the business community I was asked what kinds of reforms the government should adopt. My answer seemed surprising to those present: 'There is nothing new the government should adopt', I said. 'It has adopted every best practice you can imagine, from results based management to multi-year budgeting. It has the best anti-corruption laws you can think of, and IT systems better than those in many developed countries. The problem is that the government has not gone beyond adopting these new laws, systems and procedures to actually implement them and make them functional. It looks like a state but it is not actually a state, and no easy reform will close the gap that exists between its form and its function'.
The gap between form and function is one that I see in many countries, particularly in Africa. For instance, my research shows that public financial management reforms lead to better looking budget preparation processes in most African governments, but the budget execution processes remain weak. This means that governments produce good looking budgets but actual spending results differ substantially from these budgets. Another example comes from reforms designed to tackle corruption. African countries have increasingly improved the laws addressing corruption (to the point, for example, where Uganda has the best-rated anticorruption laws in the world). There are typically huge gaps between the appearance of these laws and their implementation, however. The watchdog agency Global Integrity calculates this gap as 51 for Uganda (where laws score 100 out of 100 points but implementation garners only 49 out of 100 points). The average gap is about 35 for African countries, compared with less than 15 for the average OECD country. Germany scored 81 for the quality of its laws in 2011; nearly 20 points lower than Uganda and lower than countries like Ethiopia, Malawi, Liberia and Kenya. Germany scores 76 out of 100 when considering how well it implements these laws, however, which is over 20 points higher than the average implementation score for the African countries listed. Germany does not look as good on paper as Uganda or Malawi but 'what you see is what you get' in Germany (where the gap between laws on paper and practice on the ground is only 5). In contrast, the African examples just look like states-with impressive laws they do not actually implement and a degree of dysfunction that undermines growth and development.

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