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Improving organisational governance and fighting corruption in the public sector

In a story in the Express Tribune on 19 March 2019, the governnment has announced that heads of important institutions will be selected by a selection committee comprising of experts from the private sector. The list of institutions include constitutional bodies, regulatory bodies and autonomous bodies in the federal government. The heads of 91 institutions need to be evaluated and appointed.
For any government and economy, these institutions are important and improving how they are managed is a first step towards improving governance.
The best predictor of future performance is past performance! I hope that apart from evaluating technical competence and cognitive ability, the selection committee also looks at other key factors that can be hard to evaluate. For example, is there any tendency towards corruption? It doesn't have to be corruption on a large-scale; low-level one is equally bad. Personality tests and psychological profiling can offer innovative ways for cutting corruption in the public sector of developing countries, says an article on Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
As a I work for a regulatory agency, I found the OECD's publication, The Governance of Regulators, very useful. It lists 7 key areas that need careful consideration:
The Governance of Regulators


The decisions of a regulator can have significant impact on various (vested) interests and there is a need to ensure and protect its impartiality. In short, prevent external capture!
In 2017, Marc-André Franche, the then-head of UNDP in Pakistan said the only way a critical change could happen in the country was when the influential, the politicians and the wealthy, would sacrifice short term, individual and family interests for the benefit of the nation.
Dr. Hafiz Pasha, a former Finance Minister said that cost of capture to Pakistan's economy comes to PKR 860 billion every year! According to the World Bank's Pakistan@100: Shaping the Future report (released in March 2019), Pakistan’s economy right now is captured by four influential groups that have frustrated efforts to bring reforms. These are civil servants, landowners, industrialists, and the military. The bank states that there is evidence that Pakistan’s elite has used this power in the past to undermine reforms that would have reduced their influence.
There is also a need to protect key institutions from becoming victims of internal capture. In an article in August 2017, Dr. Farrukh Saleem lamented that capture is pervasive in Pakistan. Pakistan’s economy has been captured-captured by a thousand families, “trapped in a vicious circle in which the policy and institutional reforms necessary to improve governance are undermined by collusion between powerful firms and state officials who extract substantial private gains….” He feels that the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP), the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan (SECP), and the Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) have all been captured to extract private gains. He recommends that "for the sake of 200 million Pakistanis, the State of Pakistan must also set up a Judicial Commission of Inquiry into State Capture"similar to what South Africa has done.


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