ABSTRACT
Contents 1 Poor Governance and Weak Administration ..................................160 2 What Is Public Administration Reform? .........................................162 3 Stumbling Blocks in Administrative Reform ..................................164 4 The Decision-Making Process: Governing by Default ....................168 5 The Impact of EU Accession ...........................................................172 6 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 174 Notes ....................................................................................................... 174 References ................................................................................................176
1 Poor Governance and Weak Administration There is ample evidence that sustainable growth is heavily dependent on the quality of governance in a particular country. One of the most complete assessments supporting this contention analyzed data pertaining to 175 nations by aggregating the main cross-country measurements produced by various organizations. This assessment, produced by the World Bank, reports a strong and positive causal link between the quality of policies and administration on one hand and economic performance on the other.i Even more interesting, the authors reported a weak and negative causation running in the opposite direction, from per capita income to governance, after controlling for the first positive effect. In other words, good governance leads to growth and prosperity, but economic growth and greater prosperity do not by themselves bring about good governance. On the contrary, sometimes they can encourage poor governance.
