IPS Research Fellow Dr Lakmini Fernando (PICTURED) says a new public management approach should be made to achieve higher efficiency in the public sector.
She made these observations at the launch of the Annual Report “Sri Lanka: State of the Economy 2024” at IPS Colombo yesterday. Fernando said that when referring to figures from 2005 to 2023, that the public sector employment has increased by about 60%.
That means in 2005 it was only about 0.9 million and in 2023 it is around 1.4 million which has become a challenge. In recent times, government’s performance according to various indices, worldwide government index is that our government’s performance is poor and the score is around -0.65 and when you compare with Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, they have strong government effectiveness with a score of 1.8.
She mentioned that the public sector needs improvement and continuously adopts capacity building programmes.
She also suggested several measures like improving the administrative operations, providing immediate pay rise, downsizing the public sector and addressing the barriers to policy changes. The need of digitization of public services was also pointed out in her speech.
There should be a new public management approach and this is like including administrative operations as one can observe in countries like New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia where the public sector is highly productive and efficient and these operations should be focused on adopting new recruitment procedures and placement and transfers, encouraging merit based performance instead of seniority based performance.
“When you have a look at New Zealand which is regarded as a country to have an efficient public sector. Their public sector is around 0.07 million and they have a population of 5.1 million. But still their per capita income is around USD 49,000.”
“Whereas in our country the public sector is 1.4 million which is 20 times larger than New Zealand. Our population is around 22.8 million and per capita income is around USD 4000 . When comparing the two countries we can go upto like 0.3 million.”
This year’s IPS’ annual flagship report Sri Lanka: State of the Economy 2024 under the theme of “Economic Scars of Multiple Crises: From Data to Policy” examines these issues in details to better understand the scale of challenges ahead and help build consensus on an economic strategy that will take Sri Lanka from stabilisation to growth and prosperity. There has been positive news on Sri Lanka’s economic front in 2024.
Signs of slow but steady improvements to economic growth are occuring on the back of improved macroeconomic fundamentals with low inflation and a stable exchange rate.
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