Public Sector Reform and Poverty Reduction

Abstract

Amajor challenge confronting developing countries is implementation as evidenced by the gap between policy pronouncements and results. This is addressed in the works of Grindle (1980, 1997) who focused on the imperfect correspondence between the statement of policy goals and their achievement in society and Iglesias (1976) who had earlier pointed out this fundamental politico-administrative problem. Iglesias cites studies evaluating the UN First Development Decade of the 1960s, which invariably concluded that the failure of most development plans in developing countries could be attributed to deficiencies in the planning process or to obstacles encountered during plan implementation.