Cover; The Politics of Public Sector Performance; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; List of illustrations; List of contributors; Preface and acknowledgements; 1 Introduction; 2 Pockets of effectiveness: review and analytical framework; 3 Pockets of effectiveness: lessons from the long twentieth century inChina and Taiwan; 4 An enduring pocket of effectiveness: the case of the NationalDevelopment Bank of Brazil (BNDE); 5 Turning Nigeria's drug sector around: the National Agency forFood and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC)
6 Taming the menace of human trafficking: Nigeria's NationalAgency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons andOther Related Matters (NAPTIP)7 'Confidence in our own abilities': Suriname's State OilCompany as a pocket of effectiveness; 8 Defying the resource curse: explaining successful state-ownedenterprises in rentier states; 9 Comparative analysis: deciphering pockets of effectiveness; Bibliography; Index
Summary
It is widely believed that the state in developing countries is weak. The public sector, in particular, is often regarded as corrupt and dysfunctional. This book provides an urgently needed corrective to such overgeneralized notions of bad governance in the developing world. It examines the variation in state capacity by looking at a particularly paradoxical and frequently overlooked phenomenon: effective public organizations or 'pockets of effectiveness' in developing countries. Why do these pockets exist? How do they emerge and survive in hostile environments? And do they have the potential t
