Leadership And Public Sector Reform In Asia

Present day knowledge about public sector reforms in Asia is quite scattered and seldom focuses on the challenges of leadership. This book seeks to address this issue by presenting country cases that reflect the great diversity of the region.

Based on new field research, this book assesses the current state of governance and public sector reforms in eleven Asian countries and jurisdictions, especially in the wake of the recent regional financial crisis that seriously affected some of them. It analyses reform efforts comparatively against a backdrop of governance problems, and seeks to establish whether these efforts represent a substantive shift in attitudes towards reform or whether they serve simply to reinforce existing practices. The authors explore a number of important themes that are central to governance and public sector reform issues. These include the role of the state, the success or failure of organizational reforms, corruption, the applicability of the new public management model in the Asian context, and the governance values and reform models promoted by regional and international agencies.

Asian Leadership in Policy and Governance examines contemporary challenges facing public leaders in Asia, providing insight into leadership processes and contexts past practices affecting effective governance and policy leadership.

This book assesses the current state of governance and public sector reforms in eleven Asian countries and jurisdictions, especially in the wake of the recent regional financial crisis that seriously affected some of them.

To stay ahead of the competition, the public sector has to ensure an effective talent management strategy to attract, develop and retain talents. Effective talent management is about aligning the organisation’s approach to talent with the strategic aims and purpose of the organisation. This book adopts a comparative country analysis, which takes into account the institutional emphasis, organisational configuration and unique characteristics of the public sector. Against the backdrop of three major stages of administrative development, i.e., the colonial, postcolonial and modern periods, this book unpacks how the talent schemes have been shaped by the reforms, experiences, cross-country knowledge transfers and evolved over time responding to globalisation and digitalisation in Southeast Asia. This book will be of great interest to scholars and public managers working on public administration and civil service reforms in Asia towards developing a contextualised understanding of talent management and leadership development in the region.

Public service reform, or public sector reform, has been a hot topic among political scientists in recent years as most existing government structures are inadequate to cope with the ever-changing environments of globalism in terms of capital and technology. This is particularly true among Asian countries where the traditional bureaucracy has been strong as compared to a relatively weak sense of community. Traditional relations between government, the business sector and labour, which slowly have taken shape in the last two decades, are now once again challenged through de-colonialization in Hong Kong, democratization in Korea, decentralization in Singapore and technological innovation in Japan. This timely collection addresses a variety of selected reform issues confronted by these four developed Asian economies. The areas of reform covered range from human resource management, financial management and pay reform, to central agency role, service improvements, private sector involvement and political accountability.

By presenting original case studies of public management reforms in Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore, this book is an important addition to our understanding of the development of New Public Management (NPM) outside Western liberal democracies. Particularly useful for political scientists, business and management scholars, academics of international relations and economics.

Reforming public-sector organizations--their structures, policies, processes and practices--is notoriously difficult, in rich and poor countries alike. Even in the most favorable of circumstances, the scale and complexity of the tasks to be undertaken are enormous, requiring levels of coordination and collaboration that may be without precedent for those involved. Entirely new skills may need to be acquired by tens of thousands of people. Compounding these logistical challenges is the pervasive reality that circumstances often are not favorable to large-scale reform. Whether a country is rich or poor, the choice is not whether, but how, to reform the public sector--how optimal design characteristics, robust political support, and enhanced organizational capability to implement and adapt will be forged over time. This edited volume helps address the “how†? question. It brings together reform experiences in public financial management and the public sector more broadly from eight country cases in East Asia: Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, and Vietnam. These countries are at different stages of reform; most of the reform efforts would qualify as successes, while some had mixed outcomes, and others could be considered failures. The focus of each chapter is less on formally demonstrating success (or not) of specific reform, but on documenting how reformers maneuvered within different country contexts to achieve specific outcomes. Despite the great difficulty in reforming the public sector, decision-makers can draw renewed energy and inspiration, learning from those countries, sectors, and subnational spaces where substantive (not merely cosmetic) change has been achieved, and they can identify what pitfalls to avoid.