Government Effectiveness in Asean

by Ezila Kamari

How Effective Are Asean Governments?

Government effectiveness in Asean as measured by the World Bank is defined as ability of a government to formulate and implement policy.  Factors which affect this include the quality and the independence of the civil service, quality of public services, quality of policy formation and its implementation, and the credibility of the government’s commitment to policies.  The World Bank indicators measure perceptions of this  as an indirect measure of government effectiveness.

This is the second indicator, this series of infographics is looking at.  The first was political stability.  (See: How stable are Asean countries? ) where for 2012 According to the World Bank governance indicators for 2012, the most stable country in Asean was Singapore followed by Brunei, then Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand in that order.

While the top ranked country correlated well, the other countries are not that well correlated with the political stability measure.  The countries which registered a positive result after Singapore are Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand and Philippines in that order.  All the other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) countries registered a negative result. Brunei was the next most closely correlated on these two measures followed by Malaysia.  Thailand and the Philippines were at least positively ranked although they came in quite low on the stability score. Perhaps one possible insight is that political stability helps but is not sufficient for governments to be effective.

Conversely, the countries around the Mekong subregion on the whole did not rank well other than Thailand.  The Myanmar government was seen as largely ineffective.  Cambodia and Laos were also perceived as being not very effective.  Vietnam and Indonesia were both seen as mildly ineffectual given the slightly negative rankings.  Countries like Vietnam and Laos and even Cambodia did generally better on the political stability measurement.  Again, this tends to raise the issue of political stability being insufficient to guarantee effectiveness of government since some governments are clearly scoring well on stability but not on effectiveness.

Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei generally have well developed  judiciaries, economies, infrastructure and education systems. Despite this, there was a small declining trend for these three countries in the period 2010-2012. Thailand and Philippines on the other hand are countries in which people have generally had small but improving perceptions of government effectiveness in the same period.

For the remaining countries there is no clear trend over the last three years.

There does appear to be a rough correlation between the level of development in a country and the effectiveness where better developed nations on an economic level tend to do better on scores for effectiveness.  This is unsurprising although the data does not indicate which is cause and which is effect.

The kind of political regime does not seem to have had that much of an effect although many of the centrally controlled economies such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar whether these are by communist or military regimes did not score well.  A better view of this correlation will be seen when one of the other factors, accountability, is examined alongside government effectiveness in Asean and political stability in later columns on this subject.

There are no easy conclusions in this rather complex area.  For those of our readers who wish to dig deeper, the list of individual variables for each data source and methodology used to produce this measure can be found on the World Bank site.


Sumber - The Establishment Post