Restructuring Cuba's public sector : an international perspective

Abstract

As Cuba deepens its economic links with the international economy, the task of public sector reform will become both more necessary and more complex at the same time. It will become more necessary because those external links will have to be managed in accordance with internationally accepted norms and rules, if they are to be effective in attracting significant amounts of investment or technology. And it will become more complex partly because the economy will become more vulnerable to external changes and partly because powerful new voices will become integral parts of the domestic policy process. And in both cases, the that are raised are especially serious for Cuba, given its avoweed intent to retain and to protect a rather different set of social and economic prikorities than those which prevail in most of the West, and indeed, in most of the world, today.

This paper is not about the choices that Cuba should make. Its focus is on the lessons that Cuba might learn from the rest of the world as it attempts to meet this difficult challenge. To some extent, this reflects the writer's relatively limited knowledge of Cuba's present administrative system. But mainly it reflects the belief that such policy choices are not matters of technical expertise on which outside experts can pronounce with any degree of confidence. In fact they are inherently political matters that can only be legitimately decided by a nation's citizens working through the various institutions of government and civil society that are available to them.

At the same time, in making its choices, Cuba needs to make the best possible use of the international debate regarding state restructuring in the developing world. And as is well known that debate centers on the need to downsize the state, in line with its current limited capabilities; to minimise the state's active role in the economy; and to promote market determined measures of efficiency. The fashionable slogan holds that states should steer, not row.

And within this context, it is said that states should promote decentralisation, introduce more 'competition' into their own operations and rely more heavily on 'efficient' management techniques from the business world.

In examining these pieces of today's received wisdom the paper suggests that they need to be treated with great care since they are generally based on very weak theory and not well supported by empirical or historical evidence. And when one looks at these questions through a different, more defensible, theoretical lens, then much of this advice can be shown to be misleading at best, and destructive at worst.