civil SERVICE?

The Philippines, Southeast Asia's oldest democracy, can claim a civil-service tradition going back a hundred years – and even longer, if the three-century Spanish colonial period is counted. Unfortunately, pure-blooded isn't a mark of quality; and the challenges encountered in the Philippines will seem familiar to people from other developing countries.

“The delivery of government services remains dismal,” reports the Senate Economic Planning Office (SEPO). And according to Clarita Carlos of the University of the Philippines, “many times the bureaucracy we encounter is arrogant, aloof, arbitrary and corrupt in its behavior”. She refers to a study according to which “almost 50 % of government expenditures is lost to corruption”.

Foreigners aren't any happier. Peter Wallace, a Manila-based political-risk analyst, describes Philippine bureaucracy as “slow and convoluted”. The World Economic Forum warns that one of the hindrances to doing business here is the inefficient government bureaucracy.

Asked to compare her country’s civil service with its Southeast Asian counterparts, the recently-retired chief of the Civil Service Commission (CSC), Karina Constantino-David, replies: “The best way to describe it is, I'm salivating when I look at Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and, to a certain extent, Vietnam.”

The civil service's problems – corruption, inefficiency, politicisation, imbalances in staffing and salaries afflict bureaucracies the world over. What sets the Philippines apart, though, is that problems have been around for generations, defying attempts to solve them. As the SEPO notes, “reorganising the bureaucracy has been on the agenda of every administration since the 1940s”. It's almost a ritual for every incoming president to vow a knock-down, drag-out decisive fight against the bureaucracy, involving words like “reform”, “re-engineer” and, more recently, “re-invent”.

The result? According to Alex Brillantes, dean of the University of the Philippines National College of Public Administration and Governance (UP-NCPAG), “things have changed, but things have stayed the same ... many of the problems remain: politicisation, resistance to decentralisation, persistence of corruption”.




Sources:

Alan C. RoblesCivil, 2007:service reform /Whose service?

Jose N. Endriga, 1997:Comparative studies of national civil service systems / Country paper Philippines, prepared for a conference at Indiana University, Bloomington. http://www.indiana.edu/~csrc/endriga1.html

McCoy, Alfred, 1994:An anarchy of families – Filipino elites and the philippine State, University of Wisconsin Press.

Senate Economic Planning Office, 2005:Report on the bureaucracy, April 2005 PI-02-05.