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Networks for Prosperity PART 2, Chapter 5: The Knowledge Organization
5.2 Improving government organization for development “Informal networks give the bureaucracy an internal coherence and corporate identity that meritocracy alone could not provide”. Peter Evans
The most prominent studies on the importance of strong internal networks among governmental authorities for economic development have been conducted by Peter Evans, alone and in collaboration with James Rauch. Pointing to the case of Japan, Evans (1995, p. 49) argued that all descriptions of the Japanese state emphasize the indispensability of informal networks for the efficiency and effectiveness of government action: “Informal networks give the bureaucracy an internal coherence and corporate identity that meritocracy alone could not provide, but the character and consequences of these networks depend fundamentally on the strict selection process through which civil servants are chosen. The fact that formal competence, rather than clientelistic ties or traditional loyalties, is the prime requirement for entry into the network makes it much more likely that effective performance will be a valued attribute among loyal members of the various batsu.” cvi Evans further explored this topic in collaboration with economist James Rauch. In two successive articles published in 1999 and 2000 they explore the effects of the way in which a government administration is organized, first on the state’s
economic performance (Evans and Rauch, 1999), and later on the performance of the administration itself (Rauch and Evans, 2000). Their turn towards this topic, situated at the intersection of sociology, development economics and political economy, was neither unexpected nor illogical. As they explain in Evans and Rauch, 1999, Weber’s and Polanyi’s interest in bureaucracy as a policy instrument, respectively from a sociological and an economic angle, although present in the first half of the 20th century, was trumped in neo-classical political economy by what they call the “Smithian” view. According to this view, government involvement would even actively hinder growth as soon as it went beyond protection of property rights (Evans and Rauch, 1999, p. 749). Following a paradigm shift in economics, away from the stark anti-statism of neoclassical economics and towards more emphasis on endogenous growth models by the 1990s, more attention was given to the effects of organizational structure on economic performance. In a quick overview, however, Evans and Rauch find that most of the work so far has been hampered by a lack of proper data on the organizational setup of government administrations (Evans and Rauch, 1999, p. 750). The main innovation in their approach lies in the development of an indicator of the extent to which a given government organization resembles Weber’s ideal-type of a professionally-run administration. They operationalize this ideal-type in terms of meritocratic recruitment and the existence of a
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