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From your perspective, what are the main issues and challenges facing the public sector today?
ASHRAF: I’ll take this question at two levels. At the local level, in Egypt, our challenge is that the number of public servants has risen greatly—we have 4 million at the moment, and we need to get back to a more sustainable 1.8 or 2 million. So we are working on how to restructure government without causing unemployment.
Another issue is how to improve public service culture, how we serve our customers, the way we do business with different sectors and how to encourage innovation in the public service. We need to think about how to provide good incentives, leadership and an environment that fosters this sort of culture. I think this is also a global challenge.
PALAI: In a developing country, the government still has an extremely important role to play in growing the economy. They have to create the necessary environment—policies, regulations, laws—to ensure that businesses can then take root and do what they do best. Therefore, the issue of public service culture is an important one—they have to begin to see their role in the bigger picture, as part of a larger economy, and learn to be more business-oriented. In the last 30 to 40 years, we have not emphasised enough their role as servants of the public in this way, and it is time we went back to basics.
There are also issues of coordination across different sectors—individual needs may involve many different pieces of information and processes across different ministries, and we need to achieve synergy among them.
The other is an issue of expectations. Because of communications that have opened up all over the world, people—even in the developing world—know what goes on, say, in Singapore. They may not have been there themselves, but they know life can be better. This creates a serious expectation gap, particularly when we have a group of people at First World level in a country that is Third World. But this is also how organisations are going to convince people, for example, that if your production takes forever, you are not going to be able to compete with people in Singapore. The pressure on government is tremendous.
FENG: China is now at a very crucial stage of its development and reform. We actually introduced reforms and an opening up of policies 30 years ago, and over the past 30 years, I think we have made tremendous progress in terms of economic and social development. We had a very important Party Congress last year and our aim is to achieve a fairly comfortable life for our people by the year 2020. Our goal is to quadruple our 2000 GDP by the year 2020, so that it will reach US$4 trillion, or US$3,000 per capita.
One challenge we face is how to promote balanced development—to ensure rapid yet sound and sustainable economic growth. How do we expand our socialist democracy and better safeguard people’s rights and interests as well as preserve social equity and justice? Another challenge is to preserve the natural environment and climate, and to promote an energy and resource-efficient economy.
Against this big picture, we believe the role of the public sector is to accelerate reforms of the administrative system towards a service-oriented government. Singapore is fortunate to have just one tier of government; we have at least five tiers, including central, provincial and municipal levels. And they are all public servants. Yesterday, one of my colleagues asked how many public servants we have—I said I don’t know.
We are still developing a masterplan for administrative reform; we need to improve the government’s accountability system, and separate the functions of government from those of enterprises. We have to standardise the relationship between the different tiers of government, downsize certain functions and coordinate across the system. This is a huge challenge.
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