1 INTRODUCTION
Not infrequent harsh critique of an ethno-administrative regime is the poor performance of the civil service, its sluggish deliverance of public goods and services, slackness in work productivity, and widening misuse of public funds.
Over the years, various efforts have been undertaken to improve public sector productivity in Malaysia, but not unsurprisingly, with limited resultant outcomes. Core difficulties often lie in translating researches on public sector productivity findings into policy actions. The elements constraining effort on improving public sector performance centre on administrative human-resource incapacity, a broadbase corruptive regime with burden of privileges mentality, a lost community soul living in a society laced with serial systemic odious practices, including money-laundering.
2 Civil service productivity: there are indicators of its deliverance have declined since 2014 according to World Bank lead public sector specialist Rajni Bajpai. In fact, there was a very “big gap” in the performance of its civil servants with Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
At a time when the emoluments and the retirement charges of the public sector constitute 31.2% of the RM$372.340 million Budget 2023 announced on 7th. October, 2022 (which excludes contingency reserves yet-to-be disclosed) in the operating expenditure which are equivalent to the 32.8% of development expenditure for socio-economic programs and projects, including subsidies and social assistance - there is more than much concern on the performance and productivity of our civil servants.
This is heading a grueling question on total government debt and liabilities as of June 2022 which is estimated to be at RM$1.42 trillion and will rise further next year. Total debt and liabilities are already 82 per cent of GDP, (read STORM October 2022, Underdevelopment of Development - consolidation of financial monopoly-capitalism).
There are many problems, but these are some underlying issues where the performance of the civil service is ranked lowly in terms of accountability, impartiality and openness of the public sector.
i) In 2020, public servants accounted for approximately 10.2 percent of total employment in Malaysia. Personal emoluments as a share of total public expenditure increased steadily over the past twenty years, from 17.6 percent in 2002 to as high as 29.3 percent by 2017.
Source: World Bank (2019). Malaysia Economic Monitor: Re-energizing the Public Service; see notes ii) & iii) below:
ii) As a share of revenue, a review done by the World Bank in 2011 found that Malaysia was spending about 27 percent of its revenues on salaries and wages/personal emoluments in 2009, significantly more than in some of the higher-income countries it aspires to emulate such as Canada (13.7 percent); Norway (12.5 percent); Australia (10.6 percent); and South Korea (9.6 percent).
iii) By 2018, this percentage has increased to 34.3 percent for Malaysia, (see World Bank (2019). Malaysia Economic Monitor: Re-energizing the Public Service).
iv) “About 90% of the 1.2 million civil servants are Bumiputeras and the government does not impose any quota for the intake based on race or ethnicity” - a minister in the Prime Minister’s department, Abd Latiff Ahmad once told the Dewan Rakyat; the civil service employment dataset belittles that outlandish claim.
In 2021, the statistics were: 987,322 comprised Malays, 94,000 Sabah Bumiputeras, 73,190 Chinese, 60,031 Sarawak Bumiputeras, 47,994 Indians, 2,414 Orang Asli and 8,656 others.
v) In 2020, Malaysia ranked 57th out of 179 countries in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). By 2021 the country’s CPI dropped further to 62nd place out of 180 countries.
By mid-2022, the SRI case had concluded with its final verdict in jailing the country's premier; but the littoral combat ship scandal is ongoing, and the Private Finance Initiative liabilities are topping +RM$48 billion where the repayment fundings are from the Employees Provident Fund and Retirement Fund (Incorporated) or KWAP - the statutory body which manages the pension scheme for Malaysia's public employees.
Then, there are still 105 PPP projects that required financial allocation from the national budget with an estimated cash commitment of +RM$98 billion.
[ public-private partnership (PPP) is a funding model for public infrastructure projects and initiatives such as new telecoms, public transportation, airport and power plants. Our Government agencies represent the public partner at a local, state and/or national level. ]
The Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer also finds that 71% of people in Malaysia “think government corruption is a big problem".
This is the absolute abuse of high-level power that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
3 A multi-dimensional approach is a possible way to improve public service performance besides understanding - and improving - upon public-sector productivity in the country.
A methodology may look something like this:
i) gather expenditure data as a starting point in examining budget execution rates, providing a baseline assessment on productivity variations focused on programs and activities undertaken by the Ministeries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs).
ii) then, by combining this information with other data such as project completion rates and administrative data from the MDAs, possibly allowing for a more granular look into productivity variances and how drivers such as ICT and digital technology, administrative capacity, training and development, financial and non-financial incentives can influence productivity levels
iii) then, there is a wealth of administrative data on the public sector, such as on budget-execution and project-completion, that can be used to undertake a deep-dive diagnostic assessment into how productivity varies across public spheres and organizations and what might be the drivers of their activities.
Hopefully, with such diagnostic assessments they shall assist in strengthening the conceptual framework around public sector productivity in Malaysia, identify areas around which future analyses and impact evaluations should focus, and highlight areas where measurement can be improved.
This is an extract from the World Bank 2019 Report on the challenges Malaysia has to confront to fulfill rakyat2 expections:
4 Can productivity performance objectives be executable or even achievable?
Here are some selective country case-studies and their resultant outcomes that we can, hopefully, learn from:
a. Improving administrative human-resource capacity, by ensuring that public administrations are well staffed and have the competencies and resources to meet task demands. Basri et al (2021), for example, found that tax organizations in Indonesia that invested in improving their administration capacity (at a cost of 1 per cent of revenues) saw a 128 per cent increase in revenue collected.
b. Merit-based recruitment can ensure that public administrations are staffed with well-qualified and competent staff that are able to effectively complete their tasks, perform at a high standard and generate new innovations and ideas. Evidence from the Brazilian civil service demonstrates the effectiveness of competitive examinations at entry for screening quality applicants (Dahis et al, 2020).
c. Improving management practices can have large impacts on public-sector productivity, as public sector managers make decisions over the allocation of resources (both physical and human) and how to incentivize and motivate staff. For example, Rasul and Rogger (2016), studying the Nigerian civil service, find that management practices in public organizations significantly influence productivity, measured in terms of project-completion rates. Recent evidence highlights the effectiveness of training, mentoring, and consulting interventions for improving the quality of management in organizations (McKenzie and Woodruff, 2020).
d. Implementing GovTech solutions in government can help significantly reduce costs by improving information flows, such as in the case of e-procurement (Lewis-Faupel et al, 2016); and by improving monitoring systems, leading to a reduction in fund leakages, corruption and poor performance, such as in the case of e-financial management tools (Banerjee et al, 2020) and technologies for improved monitoring of teachers and healthcare workers (Duflo et al, 2012, Callen et al, 2020).
e. Financial and non-financial incentives can motivate staff to reach and maintain a high level of productivity. Financial incentives that pay for performance have been shown to be effective at raising productivity in the public administration, such in the case of tax-collection in Pakistan, where revenues increased by 50 per cent as a result of monetary incentives for collectors (Khan et al, 2016).
5 CONCLUSION
Malaysia has been under the World Bank's consultancy, implementation and supervision of economic development projects since 1960s, and by participating in the World Bank’s Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators (WWBI), a global dataset on public sector employment and wages covering 132 countries, Malaysia may hope to better benchmark various aspects of her public sector against comparator economies.
Further, by combining the WWBI with, for example, data from the Worldwide Governance Indicators and the World Values Surveys, a richer picture of the correlates between public sector investments, the quality of governance, and citizens’ attitudes towards government could possibly be drawn.
Whether the country can really aim high to achieve high growth (World Bank, 2021) or merely catching up (World Bank, 2022) is the daunting task of a capital-ethos, capital-monopoly entrapped economy swirling in an ethnocapital-centric clientele-rentier relationship wallowing within a kleptocratic financialization capitalism domain seeking, craving and needing to gain unsavoury monetary entitlement rather than to improve the administration of its civil service deliverance.
The constant and often, continuous, offering cash increments to civil servants without due, appropriate and quality public goods and services deliverance is more than grave and hurtful injustice to every rakyat2.
The country, more than ever - and not never - really has to not only enhance the administration of state but also to reconsider re-imaging society templated on an ideal politico-economy.
Bibliographies
Basri, M.C., et al, Tax Administration vs Tax Rates: Evidence from Corporate Taxation in Indonesia. MIT.
Duflo, Esther et al, (2012), Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to come to School, American Economic Review, 102 (4), 1241-78.
Khan, M.Y. and Rezaeek, A. (2020), Data and Policy Decisions: Experimental Evidence from Pakistan.
Khan, M.Y. (2020), Organisational mission, financial rewards and performance of bureaucrats. University of California, Berkeley.
Rasul, Imran and Rogger, Daniel (2016). Management of Bureaucrats and Public Service Delivery: Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service.