Back in the OECD...an oblique comment on the World Bank's "Better results from public sector institutions

Most of my thinking and experience has been focused on the developed world, rather than developing countries. Thus I bring an outsider’s perspective to the World Bank’s 2012 document, Better results from public institutions. I am grateful to Nick Manning and Willy McCourt for their invitation to peer over one of the many walls which subdivide the territory of public administration, Since at least the 1950s ‘development administration’ has been a separate academic subfield; one often characterised, tightly or loosely, explicitly or implicitly, with the notion that its mission is to export the good practices of the developed world to replace the bad practices of the underdeveloped one. It is easy to understand why this should appear to be a core mission.