Thailand urged to begin public-service reforms

Strong political will "from the top" is needed to drive public-sector reform, according to a former assistant deputy minister in Canada's Ontario provincial government, Arthur Daniels.

However, there is also a need for innovations and implementation from middle-management and front-line staff.

"These are the people who hear problems from the citizens," he said, proposing that reward and recognition programmes had to be adopted to sustain a reform initiative.

Daniels was one of three experts on public-sector reform invited by the Thailand Productivity to discuss more efficient government.

The director of public governance and training centre for South Korea's Institute of Public Administration, Shin Kim, said the "Tom Yam Kung crisis" in 1997 had ignited total reforms in Korea because the country realised there was no other way it could survive in a very competitive world.

"Competency in the public sector is very important because it affects the private sector very strongly," he said. "President Kim Dae-jung and following administrations have pushed reforms very strongly. In Korea, lean government is not an option."

Kim said "U-government", or the concept of a ubiquitous government, had been adopted in Korea, where most government services could be accessed anytime or anywhere, not only at government offices, but also online, thanks to the country's high Internet-broadband penetration rate.

Daniels said that, similar to South Korea, technology had been a big driver for pubic-sector reform in Canada, where people were tech-savvy and e-government had been quickly adopted.

"However, I think the customer-centric [approach] was a key aspect. It's a 'big-winner," he said, explaining that Canada had initiated a customer-focused approach 15 years ago. Every two years, the government asks its citizens how they want the government to work and how they would like to be served. This doesn't happen only in elections.

He also cited a "service guarantee" offered by the Canadian government, under which it waives fees for businesses if licences are not issued within a specified time.

Former deputy industry minister Piyabutr Cholvijarn, who sits on the board of the State Enterprises' Performance Appraisal Committee as well as that of the Thailand Quality Award, said public-sector efficiency and the level of a country's development had always gone hand-in-hand. It is now time for Thailand to undertake total reform of its bureaucratic system, and the education ministry, in particular, should be drastically overhauled, he said.

"Speaking about lean government leaves no choices on two issues: first, technology has to be adopted, and secondly, there must empowerment and delegation of authority to people in the front line; the people who provide the services," he said.

Daniels said a key success factor in Canada was a change in the culture of its state officials, from an "administrative" mindset in the 1960s to "managerial" in the 1980s and finally to a "collaborative" mindset at present.

He said public libraries had been one of the first places at which Canada began its reform initiatives, by wiring them electronically in a bid to lure more people to libraries. The reforms did not begin with the education ministry, he said.

Kim said that although US president Barack Obama often mentioned South Korea's education system positively, Korean education had, in fact, been plagued with many big problems, including its expensive US$10,000 (Bt300,200)-per-year university-tuition fee, which was high among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and too high when compared to its quality. Implementation of a government plan to cut the tuition fee in half is not feasible all at once and amounts to no more than a political campaign, he said.

Nevertheless, he said change seemed to be on a way as big companies had acquired some universities and national universities were attempting to become more independent.

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