Public Sector Employment in Developing Countries: An Overview of Past and Present Trends

Abstract

The debate on the public sector has been central in structural adjustment programmes applied in developing countries during recent years. The common grounds of the discussion have been the size of the public sector, its role and its efficiency in delivering services. The common criticisms of the 1980s are that the public sector is too big, overstaffed and inefficient. Examines these issues under a long‐term perspective. Finds that at the aggregated level there is no clear‐cut evidence to support those criticisms of the size of the public sector in developing countries. Compared with industrialized countries, there is no particular evidence of the public sector being too big in the developing world. However, it appears that the sequence of the adjustment process has negatively affected the performance of important parts of the public sector by distorting the proportion of wage and non‐wage expenditures, disregarding their complementarity. The consequent imbalance between inputs and employment has resulted in practical overstaffing.

Personnel practices in careers of women at the top in government and business in Nicaragua and Costa Rica

“…While many parastatals in these countries have been privatized under structural adjustment policies, those remaining under state ownership were classified as public-sector agencies. Other researchers worhng in developing countries have used similar categories (Ali, 1992;Marinakis, 1994). Given the common perception of both groups as being included in the public sector in these two countries, we treated them together and explored findings for indications of differences between the two subsectors, which were not found.…”

Public Sector Employment, Quality of Government, and Well-Being: A Global Analysis

“…Despite some progress, cross-time data continue to be patchy and inconsistent for all but a small number of countries, and the few large cross-national data sets contain numerous missing data points. More practical issues relate to defining what the public sector actually is, and the varying ways different countries (or organizations) apply classifications continue to be a problem (Marinakis, 1994). In the face of these obstacles, we begin by borrowing the data and base model specifications of the only rigorous contemporary study, to our knowledge, of the links between domestic public policies and subjective well-being across a large number of countries outside the OECD.…”

The Social Effects of Economic Adjustment on Arab Countries

“…However, if public enterprise employment is represented as a share in total population (as a rough proxy for total labor force), then the situation for industrial and developing countries becomes fairly similar, with Africa and Latin America having a lower share and Asia a higher share than the industrial market economies. Marinakis (1992) has investigated the changes in public enterprise employment over time. Despite the increased attention given to privatization, amazingly little attention has been paid to employment issues.…”