What is a bureaucracy, how does a bureaucracy work and what are the problems faced by bureaucracies?
While there is little disagreement that effective public administration is central to economic development, the debate around identifying the building blocks of an effective and competent bureaucracy continues. Research on the economics of bureaucracies, and debates on how to improve bureaucracy, have fed into a growing appetite for opening the black box of bureaucracies and understanding the formation, governing rules and continued transformation of effective bureaucracies.
This VoxDevLit explores this issue, taking stock of how far we understand the building blocks needed to strengthen the administrative capacity of the state. The evidence base on bureaucracy and development is reviewed, and key gaps in our knowledge are identified.
Bureaucracy: Presentation of key takeaways
For our launch event, Guo Xu joined us to present the key takeaways from this VoxDevLit, highlighting policy relevant results from recent economic research on bureaucracy.