Governance

Students take a computer course at a private school in Cambodia.

A number of fascinating web-related findings came out of a World Bank report, released this week, which ties Internet and mobile phone access in developing countries to economic growth, job creation and good governance. Connectivity in the developing world seems to be better than ever. In developing countries worldwide, there are currently three billion mobile phone users, and the number of Internet users in developing countries increased by 10 times between 2000 and 2007.

In East Asian and Pacific countries, the number of Internet users (15 percent) was slightly above the developing-country average in 2007 (13 percent), but was still below the world average that year (22 percent). The connectivity and access to new information and communications technologies changes the way companies and governments do business, while bringing vital health, financial and other market information to people like never before.

While India is the clear leader in creating information technology-related jobs, China and the Philippines both stand out as benefiting by generating new job opportunities. And within the industry, the Philippines is also notable, because its IT services workforce is made up of 65 percent women, who hold more high-paying jobs than in most other sectors of the economy.

You can take your own look at the statistics compiled on each country, or create your own custom reports, from the IC4D Data & Methodology page.

You can also submit questions now for Christine Zhen-Wei Qiang, World Bank economist and editor of the report, for a live online chat on July 28 at 11 a.m. in Washington, D.C.

Ten years after the Asian Financial Crisis, Indonesia has re-emerged as a growing and confident middle-income country with increasing regional and global standing.

When I first moved to Indonesia a year ago, I saw a dynamic nation on the move just waiting to reap its full potential. The story of Indonesia is a story of perseverance. Ten years after the Asian Financial Crisis, Indonesia has re-emerged as a growing and confident middle-income country with increasing regional and global standing. This is a historic time for Indonesia and I’ve been fortunate enough to witness it first hand.

From my observation, Indonesia is progressing in the right direction. Important policy and institutional reforms have been undertaken. Its macroeconomic fundamentals continue to be strong and the country is weathering the global economic slowdown well.

But, going forward, there remains an unfinished agenda based on the need to make institutions more effective in delivering development results. So, while Indonesia is doing well on many fronts, it can do even better in the areas of poverty reduction, governance, the investment climate, delivery of some public services and infrastructure. To achieve more progress on these issues, Indonesia’s main challenge today is the need for more effective public institutions that work for the public interest to deliver public services and policies.

A significant feature of the Bank’s new Governance and Anticorruption (GAC) Strategy (pdf) is the emphasis on mainstreaming the focus on governance work into the sectors, such as health, education, and natural resource management.  Governance, which the strategy defines as “the manner in which public officials and institutions acquire and exercise the authority to shape public policy and provide public goods and services,” clearly refers not only to the functioning of central government administration, but also to the way services are delivered and public resources managed. 

Decentralization has been a buzz word in the development world for a while, but disagreements remain about when and how different types of decentralization are successful in improving accountability and service delivery.  Although decentralization is often used as a monolithic concept, the term can include political, fiscal, administrative or market decentralization, and can involve varying degrees of transfer of authority and/or responsibility from the central government. 

There was an interesting discussion of decentralization on Megan McArdle’s blog in The Atlantic.  Most of the readers’ examples are from the US – but decentralization is a huge, and perhaps more crucial, issue in East Asia, where governments, the World Bank and other development partners are working to find innovative ways to improve governance and service delivery.  What do you think?  Are local governments more accountable than central governments?  Are there particular services or departments in your country that you think would be handled better by a subnational government than by the central government?