One of the 2010-2016 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to reduce the poverty incidence to 14.2 percent. How possible is this?
Based on Internet data on public sector employment and poverty in 17 countries, I observed that countries whose poverty incidence is more or less 14.2 percent have a ratio of public sector employment to total population of 3.6 percent (Japan and South Korea), 5.5 percent (China), 5.8 percent (Vietnam), 7 percent (the United States), 9 percent (United Kingdom), and 15 percent (Germany) as compared with the country’s 1.5 percent.
In the face of big budgetary deficit, past administrations pursued the streamlining of the bureaucracy in order to reduce cost, but the members of Congress continued to receive their pork barrel fund (Countrywide Development Fund) which increased over time. Now it is called the Priority Development Assistance Fund. But making the bureaucracy lean has been found to be a deterrence to government’s effectiveness and efficiency in delivering basic social and technical services and in regulating the economy. The inevitable consequence is less performance in terms of results and impact but more in fund corruption, an example of which is the pork barrel scam.
If the Aquino administration will continue the policy of making the bureaucracy lean at the ratio of 1.5 percent, the country’s MDG target of reducing the population poverty incidence from 26.5 percent (as of 2009) to 14.2 percent is more myth than reality.
Therefore, the Aquino administration should do the pragmatic approach in implementing the 2010-2016 Medium Term Development Plan by starting to gradually increase the ratio of public sector employment to total population to reach the desired level, coupled with capability-building measures, among other imperatives.
—EDMUNDO ENDEREZ,
eenderez@gmail.com