Public services are crucially important to countries’ future competitiveness and can produce more inclusive economies
The World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness index was published recently. The UK ranked 9th - squeezed between Sweden and the Netherlands. Did you notice? Maybe not. These things always feel quite arbitrary for a mature economy with a good credit rating and the security of relative economic buoyancy even within fragile times. You win some, you lose some. And Singapore and Switzerland usually win anyway.
In other parts of the world, these rankings mean a great deal to society’s elites. The World Bank’s ‘ease of doing business’ index can, for example, make a material difference to investor decision-making in developing countries. Indices produced by Freedom Watch, Transparency International, Human Rights Watch and the Bertelsmann Institute are regularly cited as part of diplomatic and trade policy dialogue. The mobile phone magnate Mo Ibrahim’s African Governance Index has created substantial debate on the occasions it has not determined a worthy ‘winner’ on the criteria it sets.
I was in Oman in the Middle East last month speaking at an international conference on public service innovation (very interesting, thanks for asking). The week before, the country learned that it had slipped 13 places on the WEF’s Competitive Index, prompting much soul searching in a fascinating session I attended along with several of the country’s economic experts. In an oil-dependent country the issue of economic competitiveness is inextricably tied up with diversification, and this starting point led to some creative discussions about the shape of Oman’s future economy and implications for the design and delivery of public services.
Public service innovation has an international language with a de facto set of operating principles – which include citizen-centricity, plurality or diversity of provision, partnerships across business, government and civil society, openness and data sharing… et cetera. These are broad enough to be almost catch-all, but what do they mean in one of the more progressive parts of the broader Arab world within which the citizen voice in public services has been historically limited, and which has found recent amplification on the streets of Tunisia, Egypt and beyond?
My argument at the conference was that future competitiveness is about the productivity of society, not just today’s economic elites. Public services are thus crucially important. They should be the engine of capacity building and social investment for a more inclusive economy – not a means of frivolously spending down hard-earned wealth, as some accounts seem to imply. If the direction of travel (in Oman as in the UK) is towards an incrementally more diverse economy and labour market (both in terms of job types and terms of employment), then education, health and welfare services need to be equipping people with a different set of skills, different ways of supporting livelihoods, and with a more obvious cross-sector emphasis.
As organisations like CLES have argued at a micro-level in the UK, the underlying driver should be a desire to link people, productivity and place to mutual benefit. It requires collaboration at a policy and practice level. This in sharp contrast to a trickle down model that has selectively trickled and effectively served to agglomerate wealth and power with those already best placed to take advantage.
Next month Collaborate will be publishing its collaborative public service delivery framework in partnership with the UNDP Global Centre for Public Service Innovation. We are excited to be thinking globally about issues that have such relevance locally. I hope it can add to a debate on collaboration and competition that is already playing out in the pages of Public Finance.
Dr Henry Kippin is executive director of Collaborate, a social business supporting cross-sector collaboration in services to the public. For more information see www.collaboratei.com or email [email protected]
