The Quality of Governance: 'Second-generation' Civil Service Reform in Africa

Abstract

This paper argues that an important ingredient missing in the set of ‘second-generation’ reforms that has been advocated for Africa is the development of human capital in the public sector. Over the past three decades, the stock of human capital in the public sector, which was comparatively lower than that of other developing countries to begin with, has been seriously eroded by increasingly compressed government wages and a general flight of human capital from many of the countries in the continent, leading to low quality of governance. The paper develops a simple theoretical framework to discuss these issues and the continent's experience with foreign technical assistance in supplementing the low level of domestic human capital.