The Good Governance Standards

Table of Content

CHAPTER ONE4

INTRODUCTION4

Participation6

Accountability9

CHAPTER TWO14

LITERATURE REVIEW14

Political stability14

Government effectiveness19

CHAPTER THREE21

DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS21

Quality of regulatory21

CONCLUSION32

Rule of low32

REFERENCES43

Abstract

The Good Governance Standard for Public Services is a guide to help everyone concerned with the governance of public services not only to understand and apply common principles of good governance, but also to assess the strengths and weaknesses of current governance practice and improve it. We hope that the Standard will be useful to governors who are striving to do a difficult job better, and to individuals and groups who have an interest in scrutinizing the effectiveness of governance. The Standard focuses on the ways different functions of governance can support each other. Governance is dynamic: good governance encourages the public trust and participation that enables services to improve; bad governance fosters the low morale and adversarial relationships that lead to poor performance or even, ultimately, to dysfunctional organisations.

Chapter One

Introduction

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank enjoy a special place in the politics of world economic relations. Both organizations can claim a virtually universal membership and accountability to governments across the world. In this they are unlike most other international financial institutions, such as the Group of Seven (G-7),1 the Bank for International Settlements (BIS),2 the Group of Ten (G-10),3 and a host of other regulatory agencies. Indeed the claim to universal membership underpinned the IMF's recent insistence that deliberations on any reform of the global financial system should take place within the Fund's Interim Committee as opposed to in any ad hoc or US-selected group of countries. Yet the IMF and the World Bank need to reconsider the grounds on which they claim to be universal, representative and accountable organizations.

In the 1990s, both the IMF and the World Bank became powerful advocates of high standards of legitimacy, representation, and accountability in governments seeking to borrow from them. These standards were given the label “good governance.” Yet closer scrutiny suggests that the institutions themselves do not altogether live up to these standards. Although both institutions have undertaken significant organizational reforms in the past decade, applying their own standards of “good governance” reveals that further reforms in both institution ought to be considered.

The voting structure of the IMF and the World Bank is one place to start. Votes have been allocated in a highly politicized way since the organizations were created—a fact, in itself posing problems for “good governance” standards of impartiality and transparency. More importantly, as the roles of the institutions have changed over the past four decades, they have not adequately adapted to the emergence of a new category of stakeholders. While both the IMF and World Bank often write of the necessity of including stakeholders in the initiation and design of programs and policies, neither institution has adequately included all present-day stakeholders in its own governance.

At the same time, whether or not the voting structure is changed, there are several other decision-making issues that deserve review, and especially the respective roles played by the Executive Board, consensus decision-making, nongovernmental ...