People at heart of administrative reform
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But pay and conditions is only one ingredient of change. The civil service also needs to be made more professional. This means a change that we in the UK tackled 20 years ago when we realized that simply having highly educated generalists was not enough. They helped to create good policy but weren't up to implementing it. We needed to have professionally qualified specialists - engineers, accountants, project managers - working in government and we had to overhaul pay, recruitment and career paths to achieve it.
Let me give one example that shows the gulf in professional expertise between the two countries. China has a social insurance system that is rapidly expanding to meet the needs of its now ageing population.
The financial implications of expansion and ageing are potentially huge. Yet, to understand its financial implications the government has just three (very able) people located in its actuarial department in the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and a smattering of people across the provincial bureaus, only two of which have actuarial departments. By contrast, the UK has an actuarial department (for a much more mature and established system) of 130 people, 55 of whom are qualified chartered actuaries.
The absence of any formal organization recognition or structures causes another problem - and that is the phenomenon of job rotation. Job rotation is a key feature of civil service management and is used to combat corruption on the one hand and help civil servants gain promotion on the other. They are laudable objectives but unfortunately they also undermine the development of professional expertise.
Two months ago our EU-China Social Security Reform Cooperation project ran what was intended as refresher training for trainees from our previous actuarial courses held in 2007 and 2008. In the event, only half the trainees had attended before because the other half had been rotated into new jobs and the value of the training they received will largely be lost.
Training is another key aspect of improving performance and yet still most government agencies are reluctant to put much money into it. For most departments there seems to be a complete lack of structured training for entry level, mid-career and senior managers and a general attitude that staff can pick up the skills required on the job.
Chinese people themselves are very prepared to invest in their own development - 18,000 students alone are taking the examinations of the Chartered Financial Analysts Institute one month from now - but I doubt outside the sovereign wealth funds and the independent financial regulators, who have their own salary scales, very few will ever the join the civil service or the local governments who manage billions of RMB of public funds.
The civil service is still seen as an attractive and stable career and many young graduates want to join it. But the government must resist the temptation to believe that intensive graduate entry competition will alone translate into great performance and higher productivity on the job.
On the contrary, if the gap between civil service and the private sector on pay training and professional development continues to grow, the greater the risk that the civil service will become the home of time servers, and the corrupt. The government needs to sell the idea that a 21st century China needs a 21st Century civil service expected to perform and given the wherewithal to do it.
The author is an international consultant with the EU-China Social Security Reform Cooperation Project.
