Op-Ed Contributors

People at heart of administrative reform

By Grayson Clarke (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-12 07:54

So, the government has to steadily increase pay across the board but also relate those pay levels to the skills needed for each job and the performance achieved. In Singapore for example all civil servant salaries and even those of ministers are benchmarked against private sector equivalents.

At the same time it also needs to reduce and monetize non-salary benefits. The recent decision of Beijing Municipality to bring its public servants into the basic medical insurance scheme is a welcome development; as is the interest shown in bringing civil servants into the basic enterprise pension scheme.

But pay and conditions is only one ingredient of change. The civil service also needs to be made more professional. This means a change that we in the UK tackled 20 years ago when we realized that simply having highly educated generalists was not enough. They helped to create good policy but weren't up to implementing it. We needed to have professionally qualified specialists - engineers, accountants, project managers - working in government and we had to overhaul pay, recruitment and career paths to achieve it.

Let me give one example that shows the gulf in professional expertise between the two countries. China has a social insurance system that is rapidly expanding to meet the needs of its now ageing population.

The financial implications of expansion and ageing are potentially huge. Yet, to understand its financial implications the government has just three (very able) people located in its actuarial department in the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and a smattering of people across the provincial bureaus, only two of which have actuarial departments. By contrast, the UK has an actuarial department (for a much more mature and established system) of 130 people, 55 of whom are qualified chartered actuaries.

The absence of any formal organization recognition or structures causes another problem - and that is the phenomenon of job rotation. Job rotation is a key feature of civil service management and is used to combat corruption on the one hand and help civil servants gain promotion on the other. They are laudable objectives but unfortunately they also undermine the development of professional expertise.