The politics of new public management: Some experience from reforms in East Asia

Most of the public sector reforms taking place across the globe these days seem to be construed within the paradigm of NPM (e.g. Hood 1991) first spearheaded in OECD countries since the late 1980s. Reinvention of government, made popular by Osborne and Gaebler (1993) and former US Vice President Al Gore’s (1993) programme to streamline the US federal government, is now the buzzword of administrative reforms everywhere. In Asia, for example, the Hong Kong government launched a public sector reform programme as early as 1989 (Finance Branch 1989; Cheung 1992), with much input from international management consultants. Taiwan’s government announced an administrative renovation programme in 1993 and subsequently a government reinvention programme in 1998 (Wei 2000), all formulated in the latest NPM-speak. Even in socialist China, government restructuring, transformation of government functions, downsizing and civil service reform has formed part of the administrative reform programme since the 1980s, partly to cope with the needs of a new socialist market economy and partly to seek simpler administration and higher efficiency (Jiang, X. 1997). © 2002 Kate McLaughlin, Stephen P. Osborne and Ewan Ferlie and the contributors All rights reserved.