Authors: Jan Meyer-Sahling
Do management practices have similar anti-corruption e????ects in OECD and developing countries? Despite prominent cautions against ‘New Zealand’ reforms which enhance managerial discretion in developing countries, scholars have not assessed this question statistically. Our paper addresses this gap through a conjoint experiment with 6,500 pub- lic servants in three developing and one OECD country.
Our experiment assesses Weberian relative to managerial approaches to recruitment, job stability and pay. We argue that, in developing countries with institutionalized corruption and weak rule-of-law – yet not OECD countries without such features – ‘unprincipled’ principals use managerial discretion over hiring, firing and pay to favor ‘unprincipled’ bureaucratic agents who engage in corruption. Our results support this argument: managerial practices are associated with greater bureaucratic corruption in our surveyed developing countries, yet have little effect in our OECD country. Alleged best practices in public management in OECD countries may thus be worst practices in developing countries.
