Bureaucracies and Management of Economic Reforms

The discourse on economic liberalization has uniformly called for the elimination or reduction of governmental bureaucracies in favour of markets and private enterprise. Drawing upon some empirical materials from India and China, this article by Supriya RoyChowdhury highlights the need for some rethinking on the role of bureaucracies in the context of economic reforms in developing countries. One may need to assess more realistically than has been done so far, first, the practical limitations to any dramatic reduction of bureaucracies in developing countries, and second, the need for resocializing and reeducating bureaucratic personnel in the context of economic reforms.