by Theleaders-Online | July 1, 2019 1:53 am
KUALA LUMPUR: The performance of Malaysia’s civil service has been on the decline since 2014 and is currently stagnated amidst concerns over the public sector’s wage bill, said World Bank in a report scheduled to be launched today.
Malaysia also scored lowly for accountability, impartiality, transparency and openness of its public service, reported English daily, The Star.
The report came about as a result of World Bank vice-president for East Asia and Pacific Victoria Kwakwa’s visit to Malaysia last December.
According to World
Bank lead public sector specialist Rajni Bajpai there was a very “big gap” in
the performance of its civil servants with Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
The report compared Malaysia with OECD countries since Malaysia hopes to become
a high income nation.
“When you compare Malaysia with others in the region, Malaysia has been doing pretty well but we see that the performance has stagnated,” said Bajpai.
“If you look at the indicator for government effectiveness, Malaysia is still above in the region but in 2018, the performance is below that of between 1991 and 2014.
“If you take the average of that period between 1991 and 2014, it was higher than that in 2018, which means the performance is declining,” she said in an interview.
“There is a strong perception … that recruitment of the civil service is not fair and neutral (with) Malaysia scoring very poorly on the indicators for impartiality in the government.
“It’s the lowest ranked, even below the region and way below the OECD,” she said, adding that the government in its election manifesto had suggested setting up an Equal Opportunities Commission meant to tackle discriminatory practices in both the public and private sector.
“Malaysia also scores very poorly on the openness indicators. Malaysia is not a very open economy in the sense that data sharing is a very big problem.
“The government does not share of a lot of data, even within its own departments or with the citizens.
“And citizens’ feedback and voices are not factored by the government into the design of programmes,” she said, adding that the report would suggest the setting up of an institutional and legal framework for open data sharing.
Rajni also said that Malaysia did not perform well in digitisation and technological advances because the government had not been able to integrate into its system to provide services. Recruitment into the civil service too was viewed as being over centralized.
“Over centralisation does not allow for the people who actually need the public servants to do certain jobs … because they don’t have the right people or the recruitment takes a very long time,” she said.
In comparison, the OECD countries used a competency framework for recruitment that narrowed the required roles and skills. Malaysia performed well in other indicators such as women participation in civil service, political stability, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption.
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